The air inside the discount Maruetsu at two in the morning tasted distinctly of stale air conditioning, rotting garbage, and the suffocating pressure of shattered human dreams. Arata stood in the dead center of aisle four, completely ignoring the oppressive atmosphere in favor of his smartphone screen.
A digital pachinko machine flashed YOU LOSE in obnoxious neon letters, the tinny 8-bit defeat music barely audible over the hum of the failing fluorescent lights above him.
"Ren," Arata mumbled, his voice a flat, nasal drone over the crackle of his cheap Bluetooth earpiece. He didn't bother to look up. "Tell me again why we took a job at a rundown grocery store on a Tuesday night. I was halfway through a very important nap."
"Because our electricity is going to be shut off on Friday," Ren's voice clipped through the earpiece. It was sharp, violently stressed, and utterly devoid of sympathy. The rapid, aggressive clacking of a mechanical keyboard echoed in the background. "Because the landlord is threatening to change the locks, because you blew our last paycheck on a premium gacha banner, and because the night manager offered us fifty thousand yen under the table. Plus whatever expired milk you can carry out in your pockets."
Arata sighed, a long, rattling exhale that puffed his unruly, messy silver hair out of his half-lidded, dead-fish eyes.
"Focus," Ren demanded. "monitors are showing a massive, localized spike in ambient Cursed Energy. It's right on top of you. Near the frozen foods."
"Yeah, I noticed," Arata drawled, finally sliding his phone into the oversized pocket of his faded trench coat.
He slouched forward, scratching the back of his neck as he dragged his worn-out sneakers across the cheap linoleum. Looming at the far end of the aisle was a sprawling, multi-limbed monstrosity born from the collective, crushing stress of overworked retail employees. It was a gelatinous mass of bruised purple flesh, covered in too many blinking eyes and weeping mouths that chanted endlessly about inventory shortages, rude customers, and unpaid overtime.
It was huge, it was objectively terrifying, and—most importantly—it was standing directly in front of the seasonal strawberry parfaits.
"It's a Semi-Grade 2 at best," Arata muttered. He reached into his coat and pulled out a cheap carton of chocolate milk, expertly puncturing the foil with a plastic straw using only his thumb. "And fifty thousand yen barely covers the emotional toll of having to stand upright for this long."
"If you let it destroy the store, the manager will deduct the property damages from our fee," Ren warned, the sound of typing pausing for a fraction of a second. "End it fast. Do not let it hit the structural pillars. We cannot afford another lawsuit after last month's disaster."
"Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the grievance committee."
The Curse shrieked, a horrific sound like a receipt printer jamming for eternity, and lunged. A massive, bloated arm made of condensed negative emotion swung in a wide, devastating arc, aimed right at Arata's skull.
Any decent, formally trained Jujutsu sorcerer would have dodged. A Zenin would have parried it with a beautifully crafted cursed tool. Satoru Gojo would have simply stood there, untouchable, letting the attack crash harmlessly against the absolute infinite space of his barrier.
Arata just stood there, completely unguarded, and took a sip of his chocolate milk.
The Curse's massive fist slammed into his shoulder with the localized force of a freight train. The impact was deafening. The concrete floor beneath Arata's sneakers instantly spider-webbed, the resulting shockwave shattering every glass freezer door in a thirty-foot radius. A blizzard of frost and frozen edamame exploded into the aisle.
"Arata!" Ren barked over the comms, the audio peaking. "That's easily a hundred thousand yen in commercial glass alone! What did I literally just say?!"
"Relax," Arata groaned. His voice was strained, his teeth gritted, but he hadn't been moved a single inch.
The devastating kinetic force and raw Cursed Energy of the blow hadn't crushed his collarbone or ruptured his organs; it had simply sunk into his body, absorbed instantly like water vanishing into a dry sponge.
This was the curse of his existence. His Innate Technique: Karmic Debt.
Instantly, the familiar, crushing weight settled deep in his marrow. A sharp, metaphysical migraine spiked right behind his eyes, tasting faintly of copper and battery acid. The Cursed Energy he had just absorbed was now sitting in his internal "account," and the invisible clock had already started ticking.
The mathematical burden of his technique was absolute.
His brain passively ran the agonizing calculation. The Curse was relatively weak, so the interest rate of its malice was low, but the sheer physical volume of the initial hit meant he only had about forty-five seconds before the compounding energy began to violently cannibalize his own stamina and life force to pay the "interest." This was why he was always tired. This was why he looked like a corpse half the time. He was a walking, breathing metaphysical bank, and the economy was always terrible.
"You hit like a middle manager," Arata complained to the Cursed Spirit, his silver eyes narrowing just a fraction as he tossed his empty milk carton into a nearby shopping basket.
The Curse blinked its dozen eyes, visibly confused as to why the frail, silver-haired human hadn't exploded into a fine mist of blood. It roared, reeling its bloated mass back to strike again.
"My turn," Arata said, his voice dropping an octave, losing the lazy drawl. "I'm charging a late fee."
He reached to his left hip and lazily drew his weapon. It wasn't a masterfully forged katana. It wasn't a cursed spear steeped in centuries of bloody clan history. It was a cheap, varnished wooden souvenir sword, the kind sold to gullible tourists outside shrines in Kyoto, complete with the word Courage sloppily carved into the hilt. It was a deliberate, mocking insult to everything the Gojo clan held sacred.
He didn't bother taking a formal stance. He just gripped the wooden handle with one hand, letting the blunt blade rest casually against his shoulder.
As the Curse lunged again, all its mouths screaming for a manager, Arata swung the wooden sword in a lazy, downward, diagonal arc.
As the wood cut through the air, Arata authorized the "withdrawal." The principal energy he had absorbed from the Curse, multiplied exponentially by the twelve seconds of interest he had held it inside his body, surged out of his core. It tore down his arm and coated the blunt wooden blade in a terrifying, blinding flash of pure, condensed, volatile Cursed Energy.
There was no sound of impact. The wooden sword simply slid through the Cursed Spirit's colossal torso as if the beast were made of warm butter.
For a fraction of a second, the world stood perfectly, silently still.
Then, the borrowed energy violently discharged.
The Curse didn't just exorcise; it detonated. Its physical form instantly vaporized into a massive cloud of screaming purple ash. The residual shockwave cleanly cleaved through the freezer section behind the Curse, blasted the back wall of the convenience store wide open, and tore a perfect, smoking, fifty-foot trench straight into the empty asphalt parking lot outside.
Absolute silence descended on the grocery store, broken only by the sporadic fizzing of severed electrical wires and the gentle tink, tink, tink of frozen peas cascading onto the ruined linoleum.
Arata let out a massive, shuddering breath. His shoulders slumped forward as the crushing weight of the debt vanished from his system, leaving behind a hollow, aching exhaustion in his joints.
"...Arata," Ren's voice was dangerously quiet over the earpiece. The typing had completely stopped.
"It's dead," Arata said, rubbing his lower back with his free hand and smoothly sheathing the wooden sword back into his belt. "Job's done. And nobody got hurt. Mostly."
"You blew a hole in the structural foundation of the building."
"I ensured proper ventilation. Place smelled like mold anyway." Arata stepped over a pile of dissolving curse ash and casually grabbed two surviving strawberry parfaits from the wreckage of the refrigeration unit, checking the expiration dates out of habit. "Tell the night manager he doesn't have to pay us the fifty grand, but I'm taking these as severance. Also, the police are probably going to be here in three minutes, so I'm officially clocking out."
"I am going to strangle you with your own shoelaces," Ren promised, a dark, murderous exhaustion creeping into their tone. "Just get back to the office. Fast. We have a problem."
"Did the debt collectors find us again?" Arata asked, already heading for the giant hole in the wall to make his escape.
"Worse. Some insanely tall guy with a black blindfold has been sitting on our office couch for the last twenty minutes. He won't leave, he keeps making fun of my filing system, and he's currently eating all of our sugar cubes straight out of the bowl."
Arata froze. A spoonful of parfait, halfway to his mouth, stopped in mid-air.
The lazy, dead-pan expression on his face didn't change, but the ambient air around him seemed to drop a few degrees. His silver eyes darkened, staring blankly at the ruined wall in front of him.
He had spent six years making himself entirely irrelevant. Six years of hiding in the dirt, fighting in the dirt, and completely severing himself from the arrogant, suffocating, god-complex legacy of his bloodline. He didn't even use the name Gojo anymore.
"Tell him we're closed," Arata said flatly, his voice devoid of any humor.
"I tried," Ren replied, sounding more irritated than intimidated. "I threatened to call the cops. He just laughed and told me to tell you, 'Satoru misses his favorite meat shield.' What the hell does that even mean, Arata?"
Arata let his head fall back, staring up at the flickering ceiling lights until they burned spots into his vision. He felt a new, entirely non-magical headache forming right at his temples.
"It means," Arata sighed, crushing the plastic parfait spoon in his grip, "that my peaceful life of poverty is officially over."