A/N: this is Kinda long ahh chap so get your popcorns.
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The air in Tokyo tasted of ozone and dread. From the rooftop of Jujutsu High, we could see the distant flashes of cursed energy detonations across the city, like a storm of malevolent lightning. The Night Parade had begun.
"Status reports are catastrophic," Yaga's voice growled through the intercom, sounding older than his years. "Multiple Special Grade curses confirmed. Gojo Satoru is responding to a major incursion in Shinjuku. He will not be able to assist us."
That was the plan, of course. Lure away the only person who could stop this with a shrug.
"Our orders are to defend the school vault," Yaga continued. "The封印 (seals) on the stored cursed objects cannot be breached. If Geto acquires more Sukuna's fingers, or the other relics stored here…"
He didn't need to finish. We all knew. It would be an apocalypse with a better wardrobe.
Our little squad stood assembled in the central courtyard. Maki checked the edge of her newest spear, a vicious-looking thing with a serrated tip. Panda cracked his knuckles, a sound like rolling boulders. Toge adjusted his collar, his expression grim. Yuta stood slightly apart, his eyes closed, one hand resting on the ring that housed Rika. His aura was a barely contained hurricane of black and sorrowful pink.
My own nerves were a live wire. [Comprehensive threat assessment running,] Great Sage reported, its voice a calm anchor in the psychic storm. [Primary objective: Protect vault N-7. Secondary objective: Ensure survival of primary allies. Tertiary objective: Collect combat data on Special Grade curses. Do not attempt to consume a Special Grade whole. You will rupture.]
"Noted," I muttered.
"Talking to your brain buddy?" Maki asked, not looking up from her weapon.
"He's giving me pep talks. Mostly about how I'll die if I get greedy."
"Sounds accurate."
She finished her inspection and walked over. Without ceremony, she tossed a small, leather-sheathed knife to me. I fumbled but caught it. It was cool to the touch, the sheath etched with faint, interlocking circles.
"Cursed tool," she said. "Low-grade. Disrupts energy flow on contact. Won't kill anything big, but it might make one stumble. Don't lose it."
It was a soldier's gift. Practical. Lifesaving. I nodded, attaching it to my belt. "Thanks."
She met my eyes for a second, her gaze fierce behind her glasses. "Just don't do anything suicidally heroic. It's annoying to clean up." The subtext was as clear as the sky wasn't: Don't die.
A tremor passed through the ground. From the forest line, the world exploded.
They came not as a horde, but as a tide. Curses of every conceivable nightmare shape poured over the barriers. Flying eels with human faces, multi-limbed giants that dragged themselves forward, swarms of insectoid horrors that blackened the sky. The coordinated, intelligent malice in their movements was the most terrifying part. This wasn't a random attack. It was an army on the march.
"Positions!" Panda roared, his form swelling with cursed energy.
The battlefield dissolved into chaos.
Panda was the bulwark, a furry wrecking ball that met the largest physical curses head-on, his roars shaking the air. Toge's voice cut through the din, strategic and sharp. "Don't Move!" A group of charging curses froze in their tracks, only to be shattered by a follow-up "Blast Away!"
Maki was a poet of violence. She didn't fight the tide; she danced through it, her spear a silver thread weaving death. Every movement was efficiency, every kill precise. She protected Toge's flanks, carved openings for Panda.
Yuta was the artillery battery. He stood his ground, hands blazing with dark energy, firing concentrated beams that vaporized curses in lines. But his eyes were tight with worry, his shots carefully angled to avoid his friends. He was holding back.
And me? I saw the battlefield differently.
With my enhanced perception active, the world was a tapestry of colored energy. The sickly yellow of the controlled curses was everywhere. But now, I could see the strings. Thousands of almost-invisible filaments of manipulative cursed energy, all leading back to a single, puppeteering source somewhere in the darkness.
I didn't attack the puppets. I went for the strings.
Darting through the chaos, I became a ghost. A cursed bat dove at me, screeching. I didn't look at its fangs. I looked at the faint line connected to the base of its skull. My hand shot out, fingers clawed. "Predator."
A tiny, localized vortex. A snap.
The bat's eyes glazed over with confusion. It veered off course, crashing into a fellow curse. Disrupt. Confuse. Unravel.
"Maki! Your three o'clock is free!" I yelled.
She didn't question it. Her spear lanced out, dispelling the now-disoriented curse. We fell into a rhythm. I'd sever control, she'd deliver the killing blow. I'd eat the "hardening" attribute from a curse's shell as Panda wound up a punch, making it crumble under his impact. I'd consume the "adhesive" property of a web shot at Toge, letting it harmlessly dissipate.
I was the support. The debuffer. The tactical nuisance. And it was working.
But the pressure was relentless. For every string I cut, ten more curses poured in. We were being worn down.
Then, the air changed.
A wave of oppressive, serene malice washed over the battlefield. The fighting didn't stop, but it seemed to bow, to make way.
He descended on a massive, elegant curse that looked like a cross between a peacock and a pterodactyl, its feathers shimmering with stolen beauty. Suguru Geto landed lightly in the center of the courtyard, his long hair tied back, his smile beatific and utterly terrifying.
He ignored the ongoing battle around him, his eyes scanning. They found Yuta, burning with power. Then they slid to me, standing amidst a circle of confused curses I'd just disconnected.
"Ah," Geto said, his voice smooth, carrying over the din. "The Vessel… and the Glutton. The two outliers."
He took a step forward, and the very air seemed to part for him. "Yuta Okkutsu. A heart so large it cursed the one you loved. You are a tragedy given power." His gaze shifted. "And you. Kaito Ishiguro. The human who consumes curses. You are… a paradox. You prove my thesis every time you open your mouth. Curses are not beings to be feared or exorcised. They are fuel. Resources. You understand this instinctively, don't you? You take them into yourself and grow stronger."
He spread his hands, a preacher offering salvation. "Join me. Your power isn't for maintaining this rotten world. It's for cleansing it. For building a new one, where only those who can wield this power, sorcerers, matter. You could be more than a janitor. You could be a architect."
The offer hung in the air, seductive in its simple, monstrous logic.
I wiped curse residue from my chin. "Sorry, man. I have a strict no-genocide clause in my dietary plan." I gestured vaguely at his ornate robes. "Also, your fashion sense is kinda mid. All that drapery? Very 'final boss from a low-budget RPG.'"
For a second, Geto just stared. Then he threw his head back and laughed, a genuine, rich sound. "Delightful! A sense of humor in the face of oblivion! A shame. Truly. Then you will both become valuable lessons for the world to come."
His smile vanished. "Kurourushi. Attend."
The ground beside him erupted. A massive, multi-armed humanoid curse with a stitched-shut mouth and blank eyes manifested. The Special Grade from the movie. Its aura was a suffocating blanket of despair.
"Keep the others occupied," Geto commanded it.
The curse, Kurourushi, lurched forward, its many arms elongating into bladed whips aimed at Maki, Panda, and Toge. They were instantly thrown into a desperate fight for survival.
Geto turned his full attention to Yuta and me.
"Let's see what you've learned, children."
The fight was nothing like the brawl with the curse users. This was a master at work. Geto didn't just attack; he conducted a symphony of cursed techniques.
A wave of rotting energy surged toward Yuta. [Technique: 'Necrotic Wave'. Counter: Evasion or powerful neutralization. Do not block.]
"Yuta, don't touch it!" I yelled, already moving. I didn't try to eat the whole wave. I focused on the leading edge, the "concept" of decay. "Predator!"
A chunk of the wave's cohesive malice unraveled at its front, creating a hole. Yuta blasted through the gap with a lance of dark energy, forcing Geto to deflect.
Geto flicked his wrist. Dozens of razor-sharp, spectral needles materialized and shot at me from all angles. [Technique: 'Cursed Needle Storm'. Homing properties. Barrier ineffective.]
I couldn't eat them all. So I ate the idea of their guidance. A quick, sweeping bite of the air around me, and the needles lost their tracking, flying wildly off course.
Geto's eyebrow twitched. Annoyance.
Yuta pressed the attack, his power surging. Geto parried with a barrier of swirling curses, but I darted in and took a bite out of the barrier's structural integrity. It flickered. Yuta's next punch connected, sending Geto skidding back a step.
We were doing it. We were a perfect, unorthodox team. Yuta, the overwhelming force. Me, the precision tool that kept Geto's toolkit from working properly. He couldn't set up. He couldn't trap us. Every technique was met with disruption or a perfectly timed counter.
I saw the frustration build in Geto's eyes. This wasn't part of his script.
He feinted at Yuta, then spun, his hand shooting toward me, fingers clawed. "Curse Manipulation: Absorption!"
A different kind of pull gripped me. Not physical, but spiritual. He wasn't trying to hit me; he was trying to take Predator, to absorb my technique into his own arsenal.
Panic surged. [Host's core technique targeted! Foreign integration attempt! Resistance is...]
"GET AWAY FROM HIM!"
Yuta's voice was raw, amplified by fury and fear. A blast of pure, dense cursed energy, darker than midnight, slammed into Geto from the side, breaking his concentration. The pull vanished.
But the blast had been wild, close-range. The concussive force hit me like a truck, throwing me off my feet. I crashed into a stone lantern, the air blasted from my lungs.
Geto seized the opening. A coiled tendril of cursed energy, fast as a bullet, lashed out at Yuta's exposed back.
There was no time for analysis. No time for a clever trick.
I pushed off the rubble and tackled Yuta to the ground.
The tendril grazed my side instead. It felt like a white-hot wire had been dragged across my ribs. I screamed. The pain was immediate and profound, a burning corrosion that seeped into my cursed energy.
We tumbled in a heap. Yuta's eyes were wide with horror. "Why did you...?!"
"You're the… big gun," I gasped, the pain making my vision swim. "I'm the… spare magazine. Gotta protect… the asset."
[Sentiment illogical. Tactically sound. Host's loyalty parameters updated. Warning: Cursed energy corrosion detected at injury site. Attempting to isolate.]
Geto stood over us, his composure finally cracked. A thin line of blood trickled from his temple where Yuta's blast had grazed him. "Enough of this farce."
The air around him thickened, darkened. Cursed energy spiraled into his palm, condensing into a swirling sphere of volatile, annihilating power. The ground at his feet began to crack and dissolve. "If you will not join the new world, you will be erased from the old one."
This was it. A technique meant to obliterate.
Yuta scrambled to his feet, pulling me up. Rika's form began to manifest behind him, a vortex of pink and black rage. But she wasn't fully here yet. He needed time. Just a few seconds.
"Buy me ten seconds!" Yuta yelled, his hands coming together, power gathering in a blinding convergence.
Ten seconds against an attack that would erase a city block.
Geto smiled. "You have none."
He thrust the sphere forward. It didn't fly; it expanded, a wave of absolute negation rushing toward us.
My body moved before my mind could catch up. Great Sage's voice was a single, clear command in the static.
[Cannot consume whole. Target the core's 'expansion' property. Create a hole. NOW.]
I didn't charge the wave. I ran parallel to it, my eyes locked on its epicenter, on the point where Geto's will met the cursed energy. My mouth opened. Not a gulp. A siphon.
"PREDATOR!"
I wasn't eating the energy. I was eating the command for it to expand.
The effect was visually insane. The rushing wave of annihilation developed a violent, swirling vortex right in its heart. A chunk of its cohesive purpose was torn away. The wave didn't stop, but it fractured, splitting into two less-focused streams that roared past on either side of Yuta, tearing gouges in the earth.
I was through the gap, the taste of absolute erasure burning my throat, my side screaming in protest. Geto was twenty feet away, his eyes wide with disbelief at his own technique being disrupted from within.
He was open. Distracted. For a fraction of a second, his guard was down.
[NOW.] Great Sage's voice was the calm at the center of the storm. [All optimized energy to the right fist. Neural impulse. Muscle fiber. Cursed energy flow. Synchronize. Precision: 0.0000001 seconds. Do not think. ACT.]
I didn't think. I didn't plan a fancy strike. I just remembered the cube. The sphere. The perfect, effortless flow. I channelled every ounce of my being, every bit of mastery beaten into me, into one motion.
My cursed energy didn't coat my fist. It fused with it. It became one with the intention, the motion, the impact. It vibrated at the exact, perfect harmonic of the universe at the moment of collision.
I crossed the distance. Geto started to turn, too late.
My fist connected with his crossed forearms.
There was no sound.
Then... BLACK FLASH.
A flash of spatial negation. A crackle of red-and-black lightning that erupted not from the sky, but from the space between my knuckles and his arms. The world distorted, a THUD so deep it was felt in the bones, not heard by the ears.
Geto's expression of disbelief froze, then shattered into pure, unadulterated shock. He wasn't blown away. He was anchored by the distortion. Every curse technique he had active, every summoned spirit, every barrier, every manipulation thread across the entire battlefield, flickered and died for one, glorious, catastrophic second.
I felt it. A click. A fundamental understanding of my own power, of the flow of all things. My cursed energy control, already good, snapped into something transcendent. The world became sharper, slower, clearer.
In that frozen second of Geto's vulnerability, Yuta's voice rose, clear and decisive, backed by the full, furious love of a cursed spirit.
"DON'T MOVE!"
The command, empowered by Rika, hit Geto like a physical law.
And then Yuta unleashed it. The beam. A column of concentrated, pink-and-black energy so dense it seemed to suck the light from the world. It was love, guilt, rage, and protection given physical form. It consumed the space where Geto stood.
The resulting explosion was silent and blinding. When the light faded, a smooth, glassy crater ten meters across scarred the courtyard. Geto was on his knees at the far edge of it, his robes shredded, one arm hanging limp, blood dripping from his mouth. His connection to the Parade was severed. The curses around us froze, then began to dissolve or flee mindlessly.
He looked up, his one good eye finding me, then Yuta. There was no hatred. Just a profound, weary disappointment. "I see," he coughed. "So this is… the strength of your bonds."
He gestured weakly. The bird-like curse swooped down, snatched him up, and vanished into the night sky.
Silence descended, broken only by the crackle of dying curses and our ragged breathing.
Panda was leaning against a wall, covered in gashes. Toge was kneeling, clutching his throat. Maki stood amidst a circle of dissolving curses, her spear planted in the ground, her chest heaving.
Yuta dropped to his knees, the glow around him fading. Rika's form whispered something only he could hear and retreated into the ring.
I looked at my right hand. Smoke curled from the knuckles, which were blackened and cracked, but buzzing with a new, profound power. The pain from my side was a distant echo.
"Kaito…" Yuta whispered, staring at me. "That… that spark. What was that?"
I flexed my fingers, feeling the universe hum in response. "I think," I said, my voice hoarse, "I just passed my final exam."
Maki walked over, her boots crunching on debris. She surveyed the crater, the defeated Parade, my smoking hand. Her gaze was unreadable for a moment. Then she snorted.
"Hn. Took you long enough." But the glint in her eyes wasn't just approval. It was respect.
A familiar, lazy clapping echoed through the courtyard. We all turned.
Gojo Satoru leaned against a shattered gatepost, his blindfold back on, a wide grin on his face. "Well, well, well! Look what the cat dragged in! Or, more accurately, what my amazing students beat into the ground!" He sauntered over, peering into the crater. "Ooh, shiny. You kids really went all out."
He placed a hand on Yuta's shoulder, then ruffled my hair, ignoring my wince. "My little monsters… you did good. Really, really good."
The aftermath was a blur of medics, debriefs, and stunned silence from the higher-ups. A first-year had landed a Black Flash on Suguru Geto. A first-year had helped dismantle the Night Parade. Their "Asset-Risk" was now an undeniable, uncontrollable "Asset."
A week later, the school was still being repaired. My hand was bandaged, but the feeling of the Black Flash was permanently etched into my soul, a constant, low hum of potential.
I found Yuta packing a small bag in his room.
"Africa?" I asked from the doorway.
He nodded, not looking up. "I need to learn control. Away from here. Away from… everything. So I can protect people without being a danger to them."
"You're not a danger, Yuta. You're just a guy who cares too much." I walked in, leaning against the wall. "Try to care about yourself too, okay?"
He finally looked at me, a small, genuine smile on his face. "Thank you, Kaito. For… not being afraid of me. Or Rika. For fighting beside me."
"Freaks of a feather," I said, echoing his words from before.
He chuckled. "Yeah."
We didn't do a dramatic hug. Just a fist bump, careful of my bandaged knuckles. And then he was gone, off to find his own path.
That night, I stood on the rooftop again. The city lights twinkled, no longer punctuated by explosions. It was quiet. The calm after our storm.
The door to the roof opened. Maki walked out, holding two cans of soda. She tossed me one.
We stood in silence, drinking, looking at the city.
"He'll be back," she said after a while.
"I know."
"Things will get worse before they get better," she continued, her voice matter-of-fact. "The higher-ups are scared. Scared people are stupid. And dangerous."
"I know that too."
She finished her soda, crushed the can in one hand. "Good. Then don't get lazy. Your hand will heal. Then we train again. Harder."
I couldn't help but smile. "Yes, ma'am."
She nodded, a faint, almost invisible curve on her lips. Then she turned and left, leaving me with the night and the quiet hum of my own power.
[Post-Battle Analysis Complete,] Great Sage announced. [Black Flash Event logged and integrated. Host's Cursed Energy Quality: Permanently Enhanced. Synergy with Predator: Increased 200%. Threat Assessment for Future Hostiles: Updated. Victory Conditions Met.]
It paused.
[Note: Subject Zenin's proximity correlates with a 15% reduction in host's stress hormones and a measurable increase in neurochemicals associated with… contentment. Data filed under 'Non-Combat Optimization – Further Study Required.']
I looked at the door she'd left through, then back at the city. The fight was over. We'd won.
But somewhere out there, Geto was licking his wounds. The higher-ups were plotting. And in a few months, a pink-haired boy with too much heart would eat a finger, and a new storm would begin.
I took a last sip of soda. The sugar was sweet. The quiet was temporary.
But for now, it was enough.
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Word Count: ~3,500
A/N: like I said in the previous author note I didn't have much time to create these two chapters so they turned out kind of bland, BUT you won't be seeing any bland chaps in the future. (throw some stones if you want to see more chapters)