I shifted my weight, moving from one foot to the other in anticipation. The snow continued to fall, beautiful in its physicality, in the way it drowned out the ugliness of Tokyo post Shibuya, yet deadly in the amount of cursed energy I could perceive in it. Whatever cursed spirit had been at the edge of mine and the monk's fight, waiting patiently to attack a weakened winner, fled immediately at the change of weather.
I did not blame them, not when their enemy was a Heian sorcerer. It took me a moment of searching. I sniffed at the air first, searching for a scent but not finding anything, the wind brought about by the localized change in weather depriving me of the use of that particular sense. My wings flared, searching, hunting while my body shifted from unconscious motion to the stillness of the grave.
I had found her.
The problem was who I found her with.
They were hidden behind a barrier, one that made them invisible, blocking them off from the world, enough to hide from even my senses, but now I perceived more than I usually did. Drastically more. I could perceive souls, and nobody was more glaring than the two standing at the top of an apartment complex that must have suffered from some previous fight.
The building was run down, the windows blown out, its foundation damaged, making it lean to the side, while terrifying cracks ran up the sides of the structure. It was the kind of building I would not have paid attention to if not for the glaring souls of the people who stood on it.
The first was a man, standing on a black, murky sea. His features were vaguely Asian and completely unrecognizable. Beneath him, and drowned in that black, murky ocean, was a woman. Yet unlike the incarnated sorcerer still unconscious beneath my feet, the suppressed soul, the woman was not simply suppressed, she was not simply sleeping. She was drowned. Dead in every way that mattered. Already, her body looked translucent; the outer edges, her fingers, her toes, had already faded, turning her into a weathered painting.
I went from inside out, peering from the soul to the body, and was greeted with the sight of a white haired woman with splotches of red in her otherwise pristine hair. She was dressed in a white kimono, a purple skirt, and a black kesa robe that only covered her left shoulder down to her knees.
Uraume.
The second and more glaring soul was a disgusting one, one so putrid it distracted me so much I missed Uraume move. This one did not have the excuse of being an incarnated sorcerer. They were a patchwork of faces, like a tree with roots that cored through multiple bodies. There were sutured layers, sewn over and over again, wrapped around the black nucleus of an identity. A black nucleus with obscene eyes and a mouth that hungered and salivated. Those eyes looked back at me, and I knew he could notice me just as much as I noticed him. I did not have the time to flip my perception from inward to outward to bypass the barrier that hid my two opponents from view, but I knew my enemy anyway.
Kenjaku.
A frigid palm gently rested on my lower back, as high as it could reach, then the words followed.
Ice Formation: Glacial Spear.
A split second later, there was a massive spear in my gut that exploded out of my stomach, spreading out like the tangled roots of a tree. It hurt, a sharp spike of pain that resonated from my back and spread to the front. Excruciating in its ache, but the pain was just there to let me know of the damage. A blink of an eye later, and it was gone, leaving me to turn my head woodenly to where Uraume stood behind me, an arm still placed on my back.
She stared at me in shock, fully expecting me to have died from the ambush. Instead, a massive smile spread across my features, revealing pristine teeth. Then I moved. It was a movement that sent another sharp pang of pain through my body, notifying me that I had made my injury worse, but it was worth it for the look of surprise on Uraume's face when I spun around and slammed the ice growth formed from her own cursed technique into the side of her head.
The blow sent her flying, and she burst through a storefront. I used the brief second of respite to rip the ice construct out of my chest, sending out a great splatter of blood that drenched the incarnated monk beneath my feet. I kicked him away with a flick of my feet, and despite the danger Uraume posed, my attention was drawn to another figure.
"I told you it wouldn't work, Uraume-chan," Kenjaku said with a laugh. The barrier making them invisible broke apart and dissolved into the wind, revealing the mastermind behind the entire cluster fuck that was the plot of Jujutsu Kaisen. Kenjaku, a body-hopping sorcerer from an era so old nobody could say for certain.
"It... I suppose it is a he now. He faced your master, weakened as he was, and survived. I didn't have the opportunity to watch the entire fight, but from what little I glimpsed, you are not quite ready to face him. This is not a risk worth taking."
Kenjaku said, while looking down at me with a smile, eyes closed, hidden behind that guileless smile, and when they cracked open, there was no humor in them, only the analytical look of a scientist observing a pig fly and wondering how to take it apart so he could study exactly what made the pig special.
He took a step off the building and dropped down. I flung the cracked and barely held together remains of the ice construct at Kenjaku as he fell, and all of a sudden his fall accelerated as he applied gravity to himself, causing him to land two seconds earlier than he should have, and right into my haymaker.
I had moved in the split second he had been blinded. The gaping hole in my perforated midsection barely slowed me down as I appeared beneath him, right in time to bury a haymaker into Kenjaku's surprised face. He brought his hand up in time, his palm snapping open just in time to release a subjugated cursed spirit with a stone head and acidic grin eyes.
My fist burst through the curse. Pale white knuckles blasting through it in a single unerring blow that chased after Kenjaku, but it had slowed. The difference was inconsequential, but against a snake like Kenjaku, it was all that mattered. A cursed spirit appeared behind him, sharing vague similarities with a vulture, if a vulture had four eyes, a spiked crown of horns, and a serrated beak that breathed out acid.
The vulture's talons grabbed hold of Kenjaku's robes and hurled him backward, escaping immediate danger, but I was not done. This was Kenjaku. I could not even give him a single breath of space. If I killed him here, today, and now, the odds of my survival, as well as Megumi's, went up astronomically. I could not miss it; I could not slow down. Kenjaku saw something in my alien features. He saw how much I wished him dead in that split second, even as his cursed spirit pulled him away from my reach, and that was enough to wipe the smirk off his face.
My feet smashed into the ground, five toes spreading wide for greater traction as I readied my body like a bolt from an arbalest. The ground beneath me cracked from the force of my tensing, then I hurled myself backwards as a white mist appeared before me in a fast moving wave.
Ice Formation: Frost Calm.
I flipped midair, then landed back on my feet, my smile was gone, and in its place a frown. Kenjaku had made distance once more, and knowing the bastard, I was not going to get another chance to kill him now. I turned to the person who had interrupted me. Uraume looked only slightly worse for wear. She dusted the ice shards that remained on her black robe. Unlike the first time, I did not allow myself to be so blinded by Kenjaku's vile existence.
"It does not matter," Uraume said, turning away from Kenjaku as the older sorcerer found a comfortable position on the vulture as it hovered several meters away. "My master was in a vessel that resisted him, a vessel that did not bear his full power. You did not account for the Shikigami, which means its presence is an obstruction, a distraction in the plan. I will not allow such a distraction to continue." She stared me down. "I'll kill him here."
Kenjaku laughed, then clapped his hands in glee. "This should be fun."
---
Kenjaku watched from his comfortable position on the vulture's back and thought about the barely considered driving force behind the change to his plans. Megumi Fushiguro.
There was no particular urgency or worry. He had time, the vulture was hovering steadily, and the fight below was interesting enough to reward his attention, and yet his thoughts were on the boy.
What was special about the boy?
That was the question, and it was a genuinely interesting one, which was a rarity he had learned to appreciate over the centuries he had lived.
Only a few Zenin clan heads with the Ten Shadows technique had summoned Mahoraga at some point. That rarity made the records inconsistent, yet even inconsistent and rare as it was, the general gist was clear. Mahoraga killed its summoner and whichever enemy stood in its path. That was what it did. That was what it had always done.
He had witnessed it once, from a distance he had chosen with considerable care. A Zenin user in the late Kamakura period, one of the more capable ones, who had pushed past the weaker shikigamis and stood before the ritual with hubris mistaken for bravery.
Kenjaku had pushed that man himself to that moment, with hushed whispers, by wearing the body of his favorite mistress, he had convinced the man of his great strength. He had watched from what he had calculated was a safe observation distance, which had proven incorrect because the first thing the Divine General did was kill the summoner first.
Then it had looked at Kenjaku.
Kenjaku had run. There was no dignity in the memory, but Kenjaku had discarded dignity a long time before even then, so he had run, and he had not looked back. Luckily for him, he had been far enough away, and for some reason, the Shikigami had not pursued.
Now here it was once more. It had looked at him again, turning its head to focus those strange wing appendages on him, but there was something different about it this time. The Shikigami did not just look at him. It looked through him, and something told Kenjaku that the Shikigami recognized him.
In fact, he was fairly certain of that, and it was enormously interesting, and it was also why he had absolutely no intention of coming down from the vulture until Uraume was dead or the Shikigami was. He was not a betting man, but if he was, he knew where his money would go.
Below, the duo burst into movement.
Kenjaku watched them fight. Uraume was exceptional. It was no surprise. In this atrophied era, the Frozen Star was a marvel. She was landing blows. Actual blows, against something that had fought Sukuna and walked away with a win. Kenjaku watched her bury two blows into its ribs before it ducked back from an uppercut.
He was impressed, and began to lower his estimation of the Shikigami regardless. Was there something else to its fight against Sukuna that he had missed? Had Yuki's apprentice been that vital to the fight?
He had been completely ready to watch Uraume die. Expected it, in fact. Her delusions and her excuse that the Shikigami won only because of Sukuna's incomplete incarnation, with the other students' help, had rung hollow until now. He had calculated that the Shikigami would kill her, and perhaps Sukuna, hearing of it, might fight the Shikigami with more investment rather than the restrained curiosity the King of Curses was known for. Although he doubted Sukuna needed external motivation. The fight the Shikigami had put up in Shibuya had been enough to light that particular flame.
Kenjaku watched, only partially disappointed.
The ice came down in a sustained avalanche, a technique he had seen Uraume use against a finger bearer while they were hunting for Sukuna's fingers. The curse had survived the technique for a few seconds before the shards overwhelmed its defence. The Divine General was not that weak. The Shikigami hunched and took it, the ice ripping through and across its body, the weight and force of the hail enough to crack the street beneath its feet.
Then there was a hum.
A sound almost too low to register in its frequency. Then it increased and increased, till the ice-strewn battlefield beneath them began to vibrate. It took Kenjaku a full second to realize the sound he was hearing was a chuckle. His eyes narrowed as Uraume took a cautious step backward, as she also realized where the chuckle was coming from. Mahoraga.
The wheel above the Shikigami's head turned.
KLNK.
Kenjaku leaned forward slightly on the vulture's back as Mahoraga unfurled from his hunched position like a flower, that haunting chuckle still falling from his lips. Then all his injuries disappeared, and the Shikigami moved.
The difference was in the quality of the movement. Where before it had moved like a child, all ungainly limbs and wide haymakers, now it moved like a complete monster. It lashed out with a blow, and Uraume's ice constructs sprang up around her in defence. Instead of simply blowing through it, its arm shifted, a blade sprang out, and it cut through the ice before taking off Uraume's arm at the elbow.
The Heian-era sorcerer brought her other hand to her lips and blew frigid air right into the face of the Shikigami, but it was no longer there. Instead, it appeared beside her, blade gone. A devastating knee strike folded the woman and sent her flying, crashing through what remained of her own construct, her first screams of pain echoing.
Kenjaku felt his features twist into a frown. Something had been wrong about that hit. Something had been different.
The Shikigami moved after her, then waited until she flipped to her feet before burying a straight punch into her nose to the sickening sound of cartilage breaking, and another scream of pain. An elbow to the side of her head sent her staggering once more. Uraume's now healed hand shot up, catching the palm strike to the chest, but her reinforcement was no match for the Divine General's strength, and the attack blew through and landed.
Kenjaku watched the Shikigami brutalize his erstwhile ally and noticed something strange. Her output was dropping.
Curiosity filled him. How? Why? She was not exhausted in any conventional sense, and the injuries she had sustained were not enough to affect her output, so what was happening?
Something came flying toward him indiscriminately, and the vulture beneath his feet drifted to the side. Kenjaku glanced at it and realized it was a leg. Uraume's leg.
He looked back at the fight. The Frozen Star of the Heian era was a broken doll in the center of a crater. The Shikigami above her rested its feet on her chest, which explained the crater. It had a hand up, a bloodstained hand from where it had ripped Uraume's leg off, and now it was frozen in place, like a marionette with its strings jerked.
Kenjaku frowned. What now?
One moment it was all fire and brimstone, and now it was as still as the grave. The Shikigami took its foot off Uraume's chest and, without a single glance at him, shifted into a crouch and exploded forward in a burst of movement that sent shockwaves through that portion of the street and almost sent Kenjaku falling off the vulture.
The cursed spirit struggled for seconds before it regained its balance, and Kenjaku directed it downwards.
He came down from the vulture, landing lightly, his sandaled feet moving carefully above the cracked and ice-covered street till he was at the crater. He looked down at Uraume.
"Well, that didn't go as you planned," he said.
Uraume looked at him from the rubble. Her face was a mess. One eye pulped in its socket. The other swollen and bloodshot. Her nose was a fractured mess, and whatever teeth remained in her mouth were fewer than the fingers on a single hand.
"I... I..." She stuttered, a vain attempt at saying something. Kenjaku wondered why she didn't heal herself before remembering how shot her output was. Well, she was not dead, and while he didn't mind the Shikigami killing her, killing her himself was not advisable, so he crouched and pressed a hand to her face, channeling reverse cursed energy and healing her face partially, enough to free her words.
"It was hitting the boundary," she said. Her voice escaped as a croak, rough at the edges from her partially healed tongue and vocal cords. "Between my soul and Shiori Himi's. He was separating us!" The panic in her voice was nearly physical.
Kenjaku went still.
Those were not the words he had expected to hear. Shiori Himi was the original owner of the body Uraume currently occupied. The woman had been gone for so long that whatever remained of the woman's consciousness was a fractured mess.
He turned back to Uraume. "Are you sure about this?," he asked.
"I felt it," she snarled, shooting him a panic filled glare. "Every strike after the wheel turned. It wasn't just hitting me again. It was hitting my very soul."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then, despite himself, despite the very genuine significance of what she had just told him, Kenjaku laughed. It was a short laugh, genuine, and mad.
Sentient, sapient, and now capable of perceiving and targeting the boundary between an incarnated soul and its host body. He had sought something new, something thoroughly refreshing, and now he had found it. Kenjaku's desire to learn more about this new Divine General almost blinded him, but he shook his head. He had to focus.
He turned back to Uraume. "Well, you're alive, so we should leave. Quickly." Before the Shikigami came back was the quiet part not said aloud. They had learned something from this fiasco, at least.
__
Maki blinked confused eyes at the boy at her knees. At the boy she had pulled out of the burning car wreck a few meters away, the putrid smell that had been slipping out of the A/C vent drifted into the air behind them, a toxic green that nearly glowed in the heat of the burning car.
Blood poured from every visible orifice. His eyes, nose, mouth, ears. Poison. She knew, because she could feel it in her own body, but her Heavenly Restriction was good enough to hold it at bay long enough. Unfortunately, Megumi was human in a way she was not.
Her hand drifted to the side of his neck, searching for a pulse, but there was none. Then they went to his nose, searching for a breath even though she knew his lungs had not moved in ten seconds.
Megumi was dead.
That was the sole thought in her head until she felt it. A dangerous pressure that stole the very breath from her lungs. Maki craned her neck back woodenly, and then she saw him.
The Eight Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General, Mahoraga, stood behind her, looking like death incarnate, and despite the horror of the moment, a greater terror enveloped her. If Mahoraga was a summon, a Shikigami bound to Megumi. How was it still active if its summoner was dead?