Gojo Satoru had never been so swamped with work before.
Too many things were demanding his attention. From looking for Kento, and other missing personnel, to keeping an eye on Suguru. Satoru felt like he was being pulled in too many directions. Almost intentionally so, but by who?
Then there was the finger...
Satoru decided then. Yuki needed to return to Japan. Failing that, maybe Yuta needed to return earlier. Too many problems were resting on the shoulders of one Special Grade, even though he was Gojo Satoru.
It would be too dramatic to say that he was drowning, but the water was definitely at chest level.
So frustrating.
If the higher-ups hadn't threatened Yaga, they would have had a militia of cursed corpses like Panda to handle threats instead of wasting lives.
If the Zenin hadn't ostracised Toji.
If curse users didn't.
If, if, if. He was tired of people who were making the world a harder place to live in, just to hold on to, or revel in the little bit of power they had.
At the rate things were going, even his plan to develop the next generation would fail.
If Yuta; if Hakari.
If Megumi...
He could feel a shift coming, and try as he might, the challenges he knew they would face was outpacing his capacity as an educator. Unless some external factor accelerated the progress of their sorcery, the future was looking bleak.
If Yuriko.
Satoru thumbed a piece of paper, and a book which both lay on his desk. The girl distrusted authority, so he didn't want to rush her.
He thought of December, and the only thing he could credit her interference to were her friendships. She needed to spend time with them, at least a little more. His intuition told him that she would make things worse if she got involved without actually caring about the growing risk to non-sorcerers.
RING.
"Oh." He smiled when he saw the caller ID. And so soon, too. Maybe she was already beginning to trust him? Maybe she had more questions to ask. Either way, it would be a welcome change of pace from all the work he was doing.
Satoru's smile dropped the second he heard her voice.
***
Days later
Craziness wasn't a bug, but a feature when it came to being a sorcerer. You couldn't digi-volve without it. A sorcerer, with potential, who saw trouble, and didn't immediately go "fuck it, we ball," was typically destined to squander that potential forever.
But Yuriko was a sensible girl, he thought. Sensible enough to at least balance the crazy. A cautious girl who had some grasp on her own shortcomings. Surely if trouble came knocking, she would slam the door in its face like it was an MLM salesperson, right? Right?
Time to review:
Deliberately wasting what little time she had of active use with her cursed technique.Engaging the mastermind in dialogue, instead of at least knocking them out. Continuing the rest of her day as if nothing had happened.
"Yo, Gojo-san!" And then there was this pink-haired, cortisol-inducing menace who ran into the situation knowing he couldn't defend himself.
"Hey, Yuji." Satoru's smile was so frigid that the boy slowly edged back up the stairs and disappeared forever.
All these dumb kids were gonna be the death of him.
The day's lesson was going well, all things considered.
Satoru watched Yuriko's face contort with confusion while the anime played in the background. Confusion because she was a heathen and couldn't handle watching Moses split the red sea with a Beyblade. He figured now was as good a time as any to broach the topic.
"You got lucky."
Call it his altruistic —haha, no—predilection to develop a talent on the same level as Megumi's, call it the 'guilt' of blowing up another parent—he'd do it again—but Satoru's relief was palpable by the time he'd heard the full story. Tangible enough that it could fold his irritation, at the situation more so than Yuriko, into a neat little envelope that he addressed to his future self.
The cursed corpse—a new one since she'd traumatised the old—stirred in her arms at the distraction but made no further attempt to move. Better.
"Lucky how exactly?"
There was something about her tone. On the surface, it was the acerbic bluster of the average teenager. That I-can-do-everything vibe to a conversation that millennials don't really like. But he could see the way her face twitched—the way her pupils moved to the corner of her eyes to document his reaction. She actually wanted to know. Always. Satoru liked that about her.
"You shallowed a hole in your defences with a phenomenon. Like patching up a sinking ship with hopes and dreams."
"Huh?" she probably would have said, if they were in a manga. Maybe even a what, or just a panel with her and a sweat drop. Instead, the look in Yuriko's eye sharpened as it bade elaboration. A little testier than usual? Why?
The doll didn't move.
"Not surprised you didn't notice. You were probably in a flow state." He had her full attention now. Satoru smiled. She could never quite fake nonchalance for long.
"For sorcerers, growth is usually a gradual process. People often get stuck in their ways or trapped in methodologies that don't work out for them. I know one boy in particular who—well we won't get into that."
"Cognitive inertia."
"Kinda. When you're there, it usually takes a spark of inspiration to break free. That, or a knife through your throat. You mentioned how it suddenly felt like you had more cursed energy?"
She nodded, but he caught her eyes darting to the kitchen. No!
"Well, depending on factors like temperature, localised pressure, moisture, your opponent's cursed energy and you channelling your cursed energy in 0.000001 seconds of a physical strike—"
"You said all of that in one breath..."
"There's a small window in which you have a chance of causing a slight distortion in space that can amplify that strike to the power of 2.5. A Black Flash."
"You don't mean 'power,' do you...?" Yuriko trailed off. Her face twitched. "That has insanely uncomfortable implications."
"Eh, maybe I meant by a 'factor of.' It's too undocumented." Satoru shrugged. "A Black Flash would be the simplest explanation for your qualitative leap. You're almost twice as efficient as you used to be."
And while impressive, what he left unsaid was that 'twice' as efficient wasn't good enough. The more cursed energy a sorcerer had, the easier it was to be wasteful with it; at least, that's what other people told him. He wouldn't know.
Yuta shared the same bad habit, but despite wielding even more than Yuriko, his starting point was far better.
The difference, he assumed, was that Yuta treated his cursed energy like it was a part of him. An extension of himself, that along with RIka was his chief cause of grief from a young age, right until he was found by Jujutsu High.
Yuriko, on the other hand, was fascinated by her cursed energy in the same way a baby found fingers fascinating. Like it was a new, external thing entirely.
If Yuta wasted his reserves like a child having a water fight after watching a GiftAid advert, then Yuriko did it like she was trying to put out a singular matchstick with a firehose while an actual building was burning behind her.
He would eagerly await the day where they could keep up with him.
Her eyes narrowed. "Why couldn't you just teach me how to 'Black Flash'?"
Satoru chuckled. "I didn't say 'phenomenon' for no reason. It can't be taught, learned or consciously replicated."
A moment passed, and he saw her face cycle through the five stages of grief. Except she'd concluded on anger instead of acceptance.
"That's...bullshit," she spat.
"Quite," he said.
Her brow was twitching, there had to be more that was bothering her, but well, he wasn't a therapist. As long as she wasn't angry at him, it was fine. If anything, trying to manage her temper was improving the quality of her training.
"Ha. Well, I'll figure it out."
How arrogant. He approved.
Satoru heard her mutter something about 'random operators' and 'invalidating her calculations' or something. A certain emoji came to mind as he watched her muted rant. But while they were on the topic of cursed energy manipulation...
"You know, those nice twins Suguru raised?"
Terrorism aside, at least when he showed up to pick them up, they turned into respectable young ladies. The black-haired one, surrendered faster than he could even 'arrest' her, while her sister muttered on about logistics systems and distribution channels.
"What about them?"
"Well, one said you touched her, and her cursed energy stopped working. What's up with that?"
Yuriko shrugged, but her shoulders stiffened. Only slightly; he caught it anyway. "Skill issue?"
Satoru frowned. Just when he thought she was beginning to trust him... but at the same time he approved of her omission. Deceit was a sorcerer's chief weapon; that, and surprise.
A cursed technique that affected cursed energy in and of itself wasn't unprecedented, but it was rare enough that he himself had only encountered it a handful of times. And it was always a pain to deal with. Just like the mother of the moody child who was already turning her face away from his.
It was a potent trump card to keep hidden, and he didn't think it was a coincidence that Yuriko could do it too.
Did the unfair techniques just run in the family?
"I've been trying to work out why this Kaori, attacked you"—'Kenjaku', according to the twins— "That would have been useful to know."
She didn't respond.
Satoru knew that she knew that he knew that she knew he could read her expressions; and he knew that she knew that he knew she was beginning to learn how to read his own in return. A conversation where they both looked at each other the whole time would eventually become a non-zero-sum game, if the goal of the interaction was complete transparency.
I can still see you, you know? And maybe she did, but turning away was at least a symbolic gesture of her distrust. Satoru decided to play along by focussing on a distant fly-head instead.
Maybe it was hypocritical of him to anticipate transparency when he had chosen to keep his interaction with Hatsuko hidden, but how was he supposed to step on that landmine, without blowing everything up?
"I'm not expecting you to put your faith in me." Too much was leaning on him already. "But I am on your side here."
The TV turned off.
"Are you?" She finally spoke and her words came out as the whisper of a whisper. "You hand me a phone, 'just in case,' and I get attacked that same day? You either knew or suspected I was definitively in danger, and you didn't tell me."
What?
"Kaori knew things about my ability—"
"Technique."
"—That she couldn't possibly have known just by spying on me. Things I'm sure you noticed but didn't say you did. She scouted an idiot who had the power to hit me, and another idiot who would have been able to move me around if I hadn't adapted. They were playing for time, Satoru. All I know, is that you knew."
"Wait, is it really 'time-sync-mind-warp?'"
"What?" Her momentum deflated, and he tried to hold his laughter back, as a befuddled expression no doubt took hold of her face.
"Did I get it right?" he needled.
"No!"
The cackle that slipped out of his mouth was Shakespearean when he heard her voice crack.
"What the fuck would that even look like?"
He shrugged, replying with a grin on his face. "Fists of shattered illusions and broken promises?"
Yuriko head snapped toward him. How he wished he could 'snap' a picture of her reaction. She looked at him like he'd poured salt in her coffee and was also like she was still watching someone split the sea with a Beyblade all at once.
"Your technique," he said, pulling off his blindfold to reveal the unearthly blues. "Or rather, your cursed energy flows in such abstract directions that I honestly can't figure out what it's doing. I've noticed some formulas, but I'm not doing any maths beyond what I need for Limitless if I can help it."
Satoru sat down on the couch beside her.
"I told Shoko I've found another student, and she told me to get her another coffee. Bragged about you to Suguru, and he just asked for KFC... I haven't mentioned you to anyone else. Not your technique. Not where you live. Nothing."
"And I'm supposed to just, what? Take your word for it?"
"Yeah, that would be how trust works."
"Everybody lies, Satoru." Yuriko looked back at the silent TV screen instead. "Why would you be any different?"
Okay, Gregory. Not the time. He was starting to get it.
"Yuriko?
"What?"
"Look at me." Thus recommenced the game. Blue eyes met red as she memorised his complete expression. "I won't deny that I'm currently keeping things from you; but I'm not lying about this."2
Her eyes pupils dilated a little——belief, but he could tell she that she could tell that he could tell she didn't want to believe. And Satoru wondered how long it had been since the girl in front of him had chosen to believe in something wholeheartedly. Care as he might, it wasn't his responsibility to help her do that. He would leave that in the hands of Yuji and the others.
In this instance, all he could do was remove all doubt.
Satoru held up his pinkie. "I will not act against or conspire to harm Suzushina Yuriko unless she chooses of her own volition to act against me."
His cursed energy slide along the digit and rested there like a jigsaw piece. Yuriko gasped. It was a soft, barely audible sound; it was also the greatest admission of vulnerability she had ever allowed herself in his presence. Yuriko shakily raised her pinkie to meet his own like the missing piece.
"Or my friends?" she added.
The binding vow was sealed with a "sure."
***
Satoru smiled as she pulled away and stared at her finger like she didn't know what she was looking at.
"As for the person who attacked you, I have my own theory. I'll share the whole thing when I'm surer."
It was hilarious how quickly her expression switched from mystified to irritated.
"Most sorcerers learn what they are by the age of four. Or more accurately, someone around them discovers that they are, and typically starts teaching them then. Kaori mentioned a binding vow?"
Yuriko nodded stiffly.
"Then it's possible she knew from the very start. Since you were too young to remember. I have other reasons to suspect this, but you know."
Yuriko's brow knitted in confusion. Her mouth began to flutter open, before she clamped it shut again. Oh? Satoru sensed the deflection before it came.
"Then what about Sasaki?"
If, if, if. He sighed in the privacy of his mind. Baby steps.
"I'll know when I see her."