I was not ready to enter a colony. At least not yet. Getting trapped in a colony while Megumi was gallivanting about was a horrible plan, so I went after the next best thing.
The heat of the late morning sun was warm across my broad back, and the wind that drifted this high up was a cooling juxtaposition that I was not going to complain about. I was on another skyscraper, body still and tensed, but my senses were spread out, wings twitching to the slightest changes in the atmosphere, physical or cursed energy fueled, till I found my prey.
I tried my hardest to ignore the two barriers that restricted my sight.
Unfortunately for me, I had yet to find one, but I knew it was only a matter of time, so I allowed myself to return to a partitioned part of my brain I wandered to, while my body shifted to autopilot.
My prey was not one of the many curses that found themselves scattered across Tokyo. No, I had a more refined palate. A taste for something other than common battle. My hunt was for incarnated sorcerers, at least the ones that had not made it into the colonies yet. Cases like Tsumiki. I doubted it was very common, but there had to be others like her.
There should be thousands of incarnated sorcerers in general, and if the city were still as filled as it was weeks ago, it would have been like searching for a needle in a haystack, but now? It was simply like searching for a needle in a slightly emptier haystack.
The crunch of clawed appendages on stone called to me, the vicious splatter of red blood on a broken wall, the scream of pain from a random sorcerer, and the chittering of the curse he fought against. I could almost imagine his death, but there was no need to imagine, not when I could borderline see it happen. Still, the man was not important enough to pull me back and deactivate my autopilot mode, so what-
I felt it a heartbeat later, and I moved.
Four skyscrapers later, and two foolish and overconfident grade one curses later, I was perched on a church, body in a crouch, wings folded inward, and hand outstretched to hold onto the cross figurine at the apex of the roof. I looked down at the scene playing before me.
"T-Thanks for saving me."
A well-dressed sorcerer was resting against the wall, a deep gouge on his shoulder courtesy of the still dispersing rat-like cursed spirit that bled freely, and in front of the man were two figures, their backs turned to me.
The first one was unfamiliar, even if I knew him. Dark hair tied into buns, and loose flowing robes. The second was a boy with pink hair, a red-blue hood, dark pants, and a pair of hard-soled shoes. Choso and Itadori Yuji.
"Yo-you're a member of the Kamo clan, right?"
I understood the misinterpretation. Judging by the line carved into the side of the wall, Choso must have used Piercing Blood. How the death painting and Itadori had found each other again was left to mystery, so I ignored it for the conversation.
The injured man finally spotted the boy behind Choso in the death painting's silence and somehow managed to crawl further back up the wall he was leaning against, till he was straight up standing, his body only slightly propped up. "Wai-it, you're Itadori Yuji, Sukuna's vessel. Stay back, stay away from me!"
I could tell the boy scowled at the fear and worry in the sorcerer's voice, even without seeing it, it was in the way his body tensed. His hands tightened into fists, his muscles bulging out in restraint.
Choso sensed his brother's feelings because he shook his head at the man. "Let's go, Yuji. I told you he was not worth saving."
The older death painting turned, nudging Itadori with his shoulder, before he suddenly froze, his eyes fixed on the shadow that stretched from a few feet away. Choso's head shot up a second later, eyes widened from surprise, as he tracked the monstrous shadow. His hands clasped together as he turned to the roof of the church where I used to be.
He froze in confusion at the empty space, then my hand clamped down on his head like a vice. Calloused palms digging into his skull. He tried to turn it, woodenly at first, but there was no give, and before he could take more drastic measures that would lead to his death, Itadori called out.
"Stop!"
Choso did.
Itadori turned to me, hands up and confused. The injured sorcerer immediately began to stumble away the moment everyone's attention left him. He was ignored completely.
"You're Megumi's Shikigami, right? What're you doing here?"
I released my grip on Choso's head and he jerked back out of my reach, sinking into a guard stance, but if he thought that was enough to escape, he was wrong. I was fast enough that the few extra feet he put between us was nothing.
"You mean the Shikigami that fought Sukuna?"
Choso asked for confirmation with narrowed eyes, recalculating the distance he put between us and realizing just how useless it was.
"What're you doing here? Did Megumi send you?" Itadori began asking in a rapid barrage as he took a step forward.
"Be careful, Yuji. It's fast."
Yuji ignored the warnings and walked up to me, then his hand reached out, flat palm pressing against my bicep.
"I never got to thank you for earlier, you know. I was drowning back then... overwhelmed and stuck in the pit of Sukuna's cursed energy, and the only thing I could do was fight to keep my head up, to be aware of what he was doing at least. Your fight was one of the things that helped in that regard, you know. He was so focused on you, he could barely suppress me." He looked up at me with a smile, the scar across his face detracting from nothing. He was such an earnest child, even Mahoraga's cold, dead heart felt something.
"I saw how you saved those people. People who might have gotten hurt by Sukuna's indiscriminate attacks. Then you saved the rest of Shibuya." His voice dropped an octave, his head down like it took him everything to admit the next words that left his lips. "He would have killed thousands if he had opened his domain. I could sense it, feel what he was about to do, the horror he was about to unleash. I don't think I would have survived knowing so much blood was shed because of me."
He gave a pained chuckle. "I can hardly endure the lesser sin, what would I have done if you had failed to stop me, to stop him?"
I looked down at the boy, and this time, it was not just Mahoraga's cold heart that stirred, I felt an unfamiliar emotion. Itadori Yuji was a child who had suffered, and while it had been different seeing things protected by the distance of animation, it was a different thing standing in front of the boy, watching the cracks Sukuna had created, but that was what they were. Cracks. Not the gaping chasms that Mahito would have taken advantage of.
The boy was wrong. Even if Sukuna had activated his domain, Itadori would have recovered. He was a resilient and stubborn brat. He would have mended his broken psyche. He would not be the same boy he had been, but what did that matter?
My hand came down gently to pat his head, pale fingers splaying out to ruffle his pink mane. He stared back up at me in surprise before bursting into chuckles and leaning into the head rub like a cat.
"Thank you."
Something changed in the air, and my wings twitched in response.
It was not just a physical sensation. Even distracted, my senses were still stretched out, searching for my prey, searching for a variance underneath the physical, below the register of cursed energy signatures, below the level at which most people processed the world around them.
I was searching for a feeling, a vague sensation that could not be put into words, and I was not sure if it was actually a thing, at least until now. I finally found one. An incarnated sorcerer. I think.
I had spent time as a soul before I entered Mahoraga's body. During the formless period and the dark void that stripped me of memories and thought, before the body I had stolen, it had been a strange in-between where there were no sensory reference points except the vague awareness of existing without a vessel. It had given me something I had not known was useful until Tsumiki. Until Yoruzu. The time spent observing both of them, noting the specific wrongness of two souls sharing one body, had created a vague awareness of it, and I had stretched out my senses for it.
Another one.
It was not accurate, at least not perfect. I needed an adaptation for that. I think anyone with a good sense of their soul simply tinged that radar. That was what made me come here. Itadori had an idea of the outline of his soul. Same as Choso, and same as the vague figure I could feel in the distance.
My hand came down on Itadori's head one final time, then with a slight flex I gently pushed him away. He stared in confusion before tracking and realizing my attention was on something else.
"I see, alright then. Take care of yourself. And take care of Megumi for me as well."
I did not bother with a nod or look back. Instead, I shifted into my signature crouch, tensed like a bowstring, then shot off like a released arrow into the distance, leaving the figures behind me.
My target was moving, but slowly, and I had to make another jump, bouncing off an apartment complex to change direction before I finally landed on a street corner and looked down the road at him.
He was a simple man with a bald head. He wore robes the color of old wood, worn in the layered manner of a monk. Buddhist prayer beads littered his wrists and hung heavy from his neck. Dots were placed across his forehead in a pattern. He was not large, not physically imposing in any way, yet there was something about him.
He slowed to a stop and looked up the moment I landed before him.
"Amitabha," he said. His voice was hoarse, like he did not speak much. "A curse?" The man wondered as he looked at me. "No, a Shikigami. What is a poor creature like you doing wandering around this accursed city?"
I ignored his rambling. This close, I could sense it better. He was aware of the outline of his soul, and he did not look like any named character. My lips shifted into a grin, and the monk braced like he could feel it coming.
I moved first.
The straight punch I led with was not my fastest or strongest. I was already splitting my attention before the fight began, directing focus inward in a way I had never consciously attempted, searching for something. I was not a sorcerer; it was not a matter of searching my brain for the imprinted cursed technique. I had to search for what fueled and controlled my adaptation.
I realized a heartbeat after my punch landed on the monk, and he stood there without taking a step back. Then he lashed out with a kick that I twisted to dodge, even while distracted.
The wheel. It was the wheel.
My elbow lashed out, and this close it was less blunt force and more blade. It cut into the man's forearm, and he finally took a step back. I immediately began to nudge the adaptation mechanism, focusing on the metaphysical weight of the wheel on my head, trying to give it a direction rather than simply letting it go where the fight took it.
It was harder than I expected.
The monk took a step forward and lashed out with a blow that was somehow weaker than the first. I slapped it to the side and shifted into a boxer's stance, unleashing multiple jabs that buried themselves into the man's jaw, the side of his head, and his chest, and he received every strike head on, even weakened as they were. Still, the impact of the last jab I sneaked past his defence and buried into his left ribcage drove the air from his lungs and forced him backward five steps, his robes flattening against his body from the force, the beads at his neck swinging wide.
"A rebellious Shikigami, or a masterless one?" He wondered out loud with a glare, and I replied to him with my signature shark grin. "It does not matter. I shall put you down regardless."
His hand reached up to wipe spittle, then he exhaled, slow and even, and this time when he moved I barely saw him. The ground beneath him exploded from the force, then he slammed into me with a blow that folded me and launched me back. He was suddenly almost as strong as Sukuna. How?
He followed after, appearing above me, just in time for me to spin and catch the kick he sent down. I continued my spin, momentum on my side, and flung him downwards in my place. He landed hard, feet digging into the earth, then I came crashing down, and it took everything he had to hurl himself away.
I looked at him in confusion.
Was that his technique? Some sort of temporary strength? One second, he was almost as fast and as strong as Shibuya Sukuna, and the next, he was what I would call a grade one if I was feeling charitable. Because I was focused on it, I felt the wheel try to answer my unasked question by adapting, but I stopped it and kept trying to push it in the way that actually mattered.
The next exchange was a matter of blows. I was always the first, and the man kept his counters to single hits, but the fight did not truly matter. My focus was split badly. The direction I was trying to give the adaptation kept slipping when the fight suddenly demanded more of me, and twice I took hits because of that strange burst of strength, but I refused to react like I had previously.
I kept my focus on the wheel. The attacks simply fueled the requirements for my adaptation, even if I was moving it in a way that was different, unnatural. The third time the strange monk managed to land an attack was the final. Like a dam that had been filled up and pushed to its limit, that blow was the final attack that burst the stone walls.
The wheel turned.
KLNK.
And the world changed.
Not visually. Not in any way I could have described to someone who had not felt it, to someone without my specific ability to perceive the world. But that imprecise sense of the soul I had possessed since I entered this body suddenly sharpened into something functional.
I could see him.
Not the monk I was fighting, the incarnated sorcerer in a borrowed body. I could see the soul underneath. A bald man sleeping in the depths of a murky black sea, and the consciousness above, a different man with different features from the body he wore like an ill-fitting suit. I could see it with resounding clarity, which meant it worked.
I stopped holding back.
If the monk thought he had survived so far because of his strange, cursed technique, I disabused him of that notion in an instant. I already had an idea of his technique. He took on whatever hit I dished out, absorbed some part of the damage, and used it to bolster his own physical ability temporarily, but there was a gap, a split-second break where he needed to convert that absorbed energy to something he could use. To cursed energy. That was his weakness.
I lashed out with a flurry of blows aimed at every single structural vulnerability of the body. My blows landed faster than he could see, a jab to the throat, a haymaker to the side of his head, and when he tried to give distance, I pinned him to the spot with a foot pressing down on his. I did not give him time to convert or release the stored energy between strikes. I kept the sequence too close together for him to do anything but cough out a mouthful of blood, eyes wide, the life-giving fluid pouring out of his nose and eyes as his technique was forced to limits it had never known, his brain cooking inside from the pressure of the accumulated power he could not convert or discharge. Then I caught him by the robes, reversed his momentum completely, and slammed him into the ground with enough force to crack the stone beneath him. He stared up at me for a second before slumping.
He was alive, his technique most likely burnt out, but he was alive. The soul inside him was still present, still legible to the new sense that was running underneath everything else like a new pair of winged appendages.
I straightened and looked at my hands, uncaring of the win, and more focused on the thesis that had been proven and the implication that followed.
I could direct it. It was difficult, it cost focus, it made me slower and sloppier in a fight, and it had caused me hits I should not have taken. Against an enemy like Sukuna, this type of distraction would cost me, at least in this unrefined stage, but it had worked. I had directed my adaptation to what I wanted.
A slow smile pulled at the corners of my mouth before shifting into a dangerous grin.
Then something touched my skin.
I looked up.
A single snowflake drifted down from the summer sky and landed on the back of my hand, sitting there for a moment before it melted against my skin. Then another. Then three more. All the same. Snow filled with cursed energy.
I looked at the sky.
Snow. In summer. Falling from clouds that had not been there twenty minutes ago. My first test subject was unconscious, and the heavens had provided me with a second and a way to further my adaptation. Oh, what a time to be alive.
A/N: Directed Adaptations are a go.