Juchu Kaisen - 51

Chapter 51

Mahito watched, through a tiny hole in the wall between the human and cursed realm, as Tamamo-no-Mae met her end.

Mahito could not have called the curse his friend. They had never quite gotten to that point. And yet, Mahito had watched with a growing fascination as she had met her end at the hands of the Sovereign.

Specifically, it was his own heart that fascinated Mahito—or a lack thereof. Yet, he felt… pain at the cursed spirit’s passing. Pain, yes, and regret that he had not been able to save her.

That and an increased resolve to… follow his own nature.

It was odd. He smiled as he sealed the wall between the cursed and the human realm, cutting himself off from more of the action. Mae was dead, and the Swarm Queen was just about to arrive on the scene. Mahito fancied his chances against the Sovereign, but to fight both him and that pesky monster was… complicated.

In the immaterial realm of curses, Mahito’s form wasn’t as… defined as he would have preferred it. Staying in this place came with a rather irritating laundry list of drawbacks, including the fact that after incarnating, he would still be weak for a short time—far too weak to fight toe-to-toe against a so-called ‘Special Grade’ sorcerer.

The human that called himself ‘Axel’ had named Mahito and his friends ‘Special Grades’ by the reckoning of these sorcerers, but apparently, that title was far more impressive for a human to have than a curse.

Axel had guaranteed that his own power was no less than that of a ‘Grade One’ sorcerer. And yet, a human almost half his weight had cut him down all the same.

Mahito wondered if it was wise to continue heeding the dearly departed human’s words, given how full of shit he so clearly was. Or perhaps, he was simply underestimating the Sovereign’s ally.

Regardless, he knew that this wasn’t a fight that he wanted.

Thus, he willed himself back to his ‘hideout’, where the rest of his friends were.

He sensed them as balls of burning consciousness that billowed with ideas—human ideas. One burned with destruction and sudden death—Hotaru. Another was a vengeful consciousness, a man who wished to rule the world, but fell short—Oda. The one that burned the brightest, Mahito sensed that humanity hated her the most, yet they couldn’t help but revere her. She was the flame, and humanity was but a swarm of moths in her presence—Giri.

He could not hear or understand them in this state. Communication was sorely limited. Thankfully, by simply appearing in their midst, he had given them the signal to incarnate.

They did so, in the middle of a homeless camp outside one of the humans’ big cities. Apparently, the suffering of the wretches that wandered these parts was due to the money games that humans played with each other for fun. Not the one that people cursed, the one called ‘gambling’.

This had more to do with bubbles and lines on a graph. Mahito had a hard time truly remembering the details from that one guy he tortured months ago, who worked in the ‘finance sector’. Human nonsense was especially difficult to memorize for some reason.

Oda sat atop a wooden crate, crossing his legs, one hand on his sword. He wore a long, black yukata that barely covered much of his chest, revealing markings of red waves like flames surrounding his sternum. His hair and his eyes were both made of the same stuff—billowing flames.

For a vengeful curse, he was also… surprisingly mellow. He yawned before speaking. “Let’s hear it, then. Ma-chan.”  

Mahito looked down and went through the motions of grief, pinching his brows together, quivering his eyes, and his lips. The stitches that twisted across his pale face couldn’t distract from how fair his features were by human standards, and his long gray hair, tied in three ponytails, made him look distinctly feminine. He imagined that these factors would make his image much more convincing to other humans.

His friends obviously didn’t buy the act, but this wasn’t really for them. It was for him. They were nice enough to let him have his fun.

“Mae is dead,” Mahito revealed. “The Sovereign killed her. The human is dead, too.”

Hotaru, who was dressed like a young middle schooler in his gakuran uniform and hat, scoffed. His features were twisted and scarred by horrific burns.

As a homeless man was about to walk by, Hotaru stepped in his way and allowed the man to phase past him.

That man now had days to live.

“Who cares about the human?” Hotaru rasped. Even his voice sounded horrific. “If Tamamo-no-Mae is dead, then that is one less great curse to join our cause. Giri. What do you make of this?”

The last of their group, and the first among equals, shook her head. Giri was concealed underneath an ornate furisode that made her resemble a shrine maiden, and a veil over her head that was entirely black, except for one white character written in splashing brush strokes—Obey.

“How long after her incarnation did she fight?” Giri asked.

“Right after,” Mahito said. “She was barely ten percent to reaching her full power before she decided to engage the Sovereign.”

“It was a foolish mistake,” Giri said. “But we can use this to our advantage.”

Oda hummed. “How so? One less of us is bad for us. Especially if the Sovereign stole her from us. Now she’ll be used against us.”

“That’s precisely why this is to our advantage,” Giri argued. “Her corpse, paraded before us, as she is made to spit on all that she was after her death—it is infuriating, isn’t it? This is the final catalyst for our unity. From today, henceforth, we will work together, finally.”

She raised an arm and pointed at Mahito. “Summon the Disasters,” she then gestured to Oda-chan. “Summon the Classics.” Then, to Hotaru. “Summon the Urbans. We will meet right here. Until then, let us leave the humans alone until the meeting is over.”

Giri loved telling people what to do, which made sense when you considered where she came from. Didn’t make her any less charming, of course. On the contrary, Mahito loved listening to Giri. She was like a big sister to him.

He wondered if he would shed even a single tear if she were to be exorcised. He had his doubts that he would, honestly. Still, that didn’t make their connection any less real.

Three human hours later, and this homeless camp was now a haunt for the strongest curses in all of Japan.

Jogo had arrived, upon Mahito’s invitation. He had brought his friends Hanami and their little baby cursed womb whom Hanami was carrying on her back with some cloth. He was sitting on the hood of a car, smoke pouring out from his ears in irritation, while Hanami was standing next to the car. “This better be good. And productive.”

“Speak for yourself,” sitting on the floor, sat the great Shuten Douji. “You always put on airs when we meet. And it always pisses me off.” He was orange-skinned, four armed, and bristling with muscle, wearing furs and leather. He had one eye and a horn growing from the top of his head—the archetypical oni. Surrounding him were a few of his tribe—Ao Oni, the Blue Oni from the cautionary tale about people-pleasing, Kyuubi no Kitsune, the Nine-Tailed Fox Spirit, currently in a beautiful female form, with nine white tails fanning behind her, and high up in the sky, the Rainbow Dragon, a creature of white indestructible skin, flew in figure eights. “And why did we invite those freaks?”

A white squat toilet on the ground had inexplicably appeared with her arrival, and her face could barely be seen inside of it. Hanako-san of the toilet. Next to her floated the halved ghost Teke Teke, and the white-clad Hachishakusama, whose entire thing just seemed to be that she was ‘tall’. Eight feet to be exact.

Mahito quite liked this bunch. They were lighthearted weirdos that were also massive divas, because of how famous they were in the world of humans.

“We have every right to be here,” Hanako replied, her voice echo-y from being inside the toilet.

“Where’s the other tall one?” Mahito asked them. “Kuchisake?”

Hachishakusama snarled at him. “She’s dead. The Six Eyes killed her.”

“Po, po, po,” Mahito shook his head in mock sympathy, borrowing her silly catchphrase or whatever she called it.

“And you say I put on airs,” Jogo snorted. “I have nothing against those weirdos. I’m the strongest cursed spirit in this place and I know it. And that includes you, too, Hotaru, so don’t start getting a big head lest I remind you of how long volcanoes have existed compared to your flashy lights.”

Hotaru pulled down the brim of his cap slightly.

“Nariko is dead.”

Oda stood up, his hair and eyes blazing as he spoke, and yet his tone and volume was calm and measured.

“You knew her as Tamamo-no-Mae,” he went on. “The legendary figure. Half-folklore, half-person. Well, I knew the person in her. We were separated by half a millennium of time, but I considered her a good friend. And she is dead.”

Mahito gasped at the sight of Oda-chan’s impassioned speech. Though it was delivered monotonously, the flames on his hair picked up. Nearby shanty huts spontaneously combusted, and some of the homeless people began to panic.

The pyres lit up the area, now darkened by dusk.

“Killed by the Sovereign of legend,” Giri took over, stepping into the center of the circle of curses. The Rainbow dragon up above roared shrilly at the name. “Yes—heed my words. That accursed technique has finally reappeared. But things are different, now. Many of us can now speak. We have minds. We have forms. As long as we band together, we can strike back at the humans’ reign of terror.”

She waved her arm at the homeless men trying to take out the fires on their huts. Their eyes glazed over and they fell on their knees in front of the fires. There, they genuflected, slowly letting the fire encroach on them.

“The Six Eyes. The Swarm Queen. And now the Sovereign. Enough is enough! When will we accept that we are, indeed, stronger together? When will we accept that we can no longer afford to operate independently?!”

Hanako of the toilet burst out from her conjured toilet on the ground. “Kuchisake-onna was killed by the Six Eyes!”

“Heard you the first time, toilet-breath,” Mahito muttered under his breath, grinning. Thankfully, no one heard him. Except Hotaru, who just nudged his leg with his elbow.

“Don’t make me laugh,” Hotaru whispered. “This is serious.”

Shuten Douji slammed one of his four fists on the ground, hard enough to create a crack on the earth wide enough for one of the humans to fall into with a scream. “Don’t stand there and advocate for us to flock together like weaklings such that we may avoid what us to come, Giri! I have more pride than that.”

“This isn’t about pride,” Giri continued. “I do have a plan.”

Jogo giggled, heating up so much that the car he sat on spontaneously combusted. “I’m all ears, little one!” To emphasize the point, he screwed the disk on his head that counted as his ‘ear’.

“Taira no Masakado, Emperor Sutoku, Sugawara no Michizane,” Giri pronounced the names with the tone of a human priest mentioning sacred subjects. “The Three Great Vengeful Spirits of Japan, all of whom wreaked havoc all across the country after their unjust deaths. The humans, so terrified of these beings, and incapable of mustering powerful enough sorcerers to rebuff them, had no other choice but to deify them—a complicated ritual that enshrined them as kami and neutralized them. But that was only a stopgap. They live. They yet survive in the hearts of humans, and they can be freed.”

Giri nodded, turning around and doing a full revolution to address all the curses equally. “And why stop there? Ryōmen Sukuna, the King of Curses, would gladly join our cause, should we find a way to incarnate him. We can reawaken all the greatest monsters of human history. We can even awaken the First One.”

Mahito breathed slightly in exasperation. The First One was a laughable myth, and everyone knew it. She wouldn’t win herself any favors by dangling fairy tales.

Jogo scoffed. “The curse curse?” He shook his head. “And how do you suppose we incarnate that? While we’re at it, why don’t we just go ahead and dig up the devil from hell that all these humans are so scared of?”

“Why not?” Giri asked. “Who is to say that they are not real? And as for the how… it’s simple: we expose it. All of it. The moment humanity wholeheartedly comes to believe in the existence of curses, we would have won! The moment that happens, the worst, most nightmarish creatures of their collective imagination will join our midst. We will have the devil, and we will have the First Curse!”

Mahito sent a pleading expression to Jogo nonetheless. He had an affinity for the Disasters that Giri was aware of, and Jogo really was quite the swell guy when you got to know him.

Jogo raised his one eyebrow at Mahito questioningly, but in an uneven way meant to evoke the ‘one eyebrow up’ thing that humans liked to do. How fun.

Mahito reassured him with a fervent nod. Do it for me, big guy!

Jogo shrugged, and started grinning.

Then, he began to giggle. And then laugh.

“HAHAH!” Jogo jumped to his feet and roared his laughter to the skies. “Screw it! I’ll join you then, little girl! Lead the way—as long as it’s interesting, damn it! What say you, Shuten Douji?!”

Shuten Douji got up on his feet, gave Kyuubi and Ao Oni each a look.

The Rainbow Dragon high above roared his assent.

The orange-skinned demon, a pale imitation of Sukuna, really—though Mahito would never let him catch him saying that—gave a nod. “You’ve bought my loyalty for a time, Giri. But remember: I’m a curse, not a human. I don’t subscribe to obligations of duty, so if you disappoint, I’ll crush you myself.”

“A feast of one hundred human school children,” Hanako pronounced imperiously. “To mark our alliance. It will be a feast for the ages.”

“Not yet,” Giri said, holding up her hand. “Discretion for now. We wait for the time to strike.”

The excitement died down instantly.

“Wait?!” Jogo shouted.

“No way,” Shuten Douji snorted.

Mahito rubbed the back of his head, giggling to himself. “The curse alliance is off to a rough start, then.”

Hotaru shoved him with a snort at his wise-cracking, and Mahito chuckled despite himself.

Oh well. Win or lose, at least we’ll have some fun.

000

Itadori Yuji was quite the crybaby, Kaori had discovered as of late. At birth, he had cried an appropriate amount of time for a newborn. During the months that followed, he’d been so well-behaved, only crying to alert Kaori to his needs.

It had been a year and over a month since his birth, and the boy had finally discovered his ability to curse the world by being a… baby.

What a joy.

Kaori was in the bathroom, washing her face and going through her morning ritual when she heard that infernal cry.

“I’ve got it!” her dear husband Jin called out from the bedroom outside the door to the bathroom. She heard his steps as he hurried over to the crib to rock the baby and—very vitally—make him someone other than her problem.

She ran her fingers across the stitches on her forehead. They were all but healed now, owing to how ‘full time’ this particular step of her plan was.

Despite everything, even.

She felt a buzz in her pocket, and pulled out her cellphone. The curious new-age device made communication so much easier than before. It also had a bad habit of making her feel ancient, which she didn’t quite like. Time and time again, she had wondered if her time wouldn’t be better served in science or technology. She could buy some imaginary non-sorcerer money, the kind that was tied to the random whims of the market. She could make money that way—enough to fund whatever science fiction project crossed her mind.

Human cloning. Bioterrorism. Gene splicing. Ah, the possibilities were endless.

This new era promised to be ten times—no, a hundred times—more interesting than the Heian era.

Not least of all due to the actions of a particular young genius, the empress of hypocrisy herself: Hibana Teira.

Itadori Kaori was having the time of her life.

If all factors were held constant, except for the fact that this was not the modern era, but instead the Meiji era, or somesuch age of low technological attainment, then Teira’s actions would still have contributed to the second coming of the Golden Age of Jujutsu.

Thousands of new sorcerers, all of whom would eventually splinter and band together in factions both new and old. Modern politics would become shaped by them. Civil wars would once again ravage the country, all so that Jujutsu Sorcerers could demonstrate their supremacy.

All it would require was for Hibana Teira to embrace her inner despot, and extend her categorical lack of mercy to the rest of the so-called Jujutsu Society. She was capable of it. As capable of taking control and killing the higher-ups as she was of doing so the first time around, when she was only eight, and Kaori had caught her breaking all the bones of her former clan head with such pointed and focused malice!

She was the time bomb waiting to provide Kaori, no…

Kenjaku.

She was the time bomb waiting to provide Kenjaku the time of her life.

She checked her phone.

That idiot Axel was dead. Too bad. He was a strong one, too. The few curse users that Kenjaku had managed to unearth in the wake of Teira-chan’s purge. They were becoming both antsier and more suicidal. They were violent revolutionaries hellbent on their war.

The curses were likely reeling after the loss of one of their number. Although sentient curses were becoming more common than ever before, owing to their mastery of existing within the cursed realm, they were still an incredibly rare breed. Despite their nature, they also had a capacity to mourn their dead.

If Kenjaku was lucky, they might end up finding someone in their number that had a spark of creativity. Someone that could create rather than simply destroy. Cursed spirits were an accursed race of dimwits whose very nature disallowed them to be interesting, because they had no benevolence to temper their pure evil.

The sentient ones, however, had the potential to buck that trend entirely.

And if they connected with a psychological ‘seed’ of humanity?

They would be capable of something unique to the human condition: true evil.

For even in all these years of human history, cursed spirits were so insignificant to the story of human evil that they were not even seen as real.

That could change one day. Kenjaku didn’t particularly care how, or when that would happen. True evil wasn’t their goal. But it was a means.

A means to something new and interesting.

They’d have to track one of those children down, make friends with them and whatnot. They had already spotted Teira-chan’s weaknesses by way of manipulating some of the curses to attack Nagoya and Okinawa. They knew that little girl’s weaknesses.

Nevertheless, they’d steer clear of Teira-chan, of course. That girl was a woman possessed. Kenjaku only had themself to blame. They did so love shaping the world views of young children, even when it came back to bite them in the ass.

Especially when it did that!

So much fun.

“What are you laughing at?”

Jin appeared in the bathroom, on the doorway, rocking the sleeping Yuji. The pink-haired dolt grinned at Kaori in that earnest and vulnerable way that he liked to do. Kaori had fucked him into devoting himself to her in his entirety: mind body and soul.

And it had been fun.

She did so love to shatter the human psyche, and there was no hammer denser than love to achieve that task.

But with all broken toys, Jin was rapidly starting to become rather… boring.

Yuji required another year of breastfeeding tops, and then Kaori would move on. And she’d have her fun with Jin, as always.

Yes, life was… really clicking as of late.

“I’m just… so happy,” Kaori said, grinning at her dear toy, her dear husband. “Life is good, dear.”

“I’m glad.”

“So am I, dear,” she blushed fiercely at her own thoughts. “So. Am. I.”

000

Non-sorcerers were truly underrated in their technologically ingenuity, for they had invented this thing known as ‘e-mail’!

Zen'in Naobito could imagine so many different applications to such a miraculous technology. As he sat in on this meeting—ordered by him, of course, as the 26th head of the Zen'in clan—he pictured a future in which this could have been one such meeting.

He sat on the head of a long table, eighteen elders divided in two on both sides of the table, chattering amongst one another.

In the near future, it was possible that they could have simply taken his own e-mail as the gospel that it was and accept it as such. He could have simply laid down the law, and saved his message in a server to be preserved for all time.

Unfortunately, men like these preferred to be ordered around in-person.

It was the great flaw of these old-school men that they could not accept the greatest authority of all within their own clan unless that authority made a personal appearance and laid down the law himself. Nay, they needed an additional effort.

What a bother.

He doubted that even in the near future, when the non-sorcerers finally invented video calls or even holographic calls, this sort of in-person meeting would fall out of fashion. After all, what was power if not pointless appearances?

Naobito cleared his throat.

The room fell silent within seconds. Just a beat too late to indicate that everyone was on the same page, however. He read their latency easily enough in what it meant.

They wanted him to present a solution to their ever-present problem.

The Teira problem.

They clamored for the false emperor’s death with every waking moment.

They wanted to buck progress by clinging onto tradition.

Foolish. Tradition died. That was simply what it did.

He opened his mouth—savoring the silent gasps of those in attendance, waiting in anticipation to hear him speak—and he just spoke.

Jazz tunes sounded in his ear as he delivered his order to the clan, his model of a new tomorrow, the next stage of the Zen'in clan.

In fact… he could recall the exact jazz tune!

It was by that non-sorcerer, the one from Hokkaido by the name of Fukui Ryo! Horizon!

“It cannot be so, your majesty!” One elder cried, but that too figured into his mental symphony.

“Please, clan head! This is too much!”

“Think of our clansmen!”

Naobito laughed. “Why should our clansmen feel threatened by the arrival of some newblood? Why should they be made to cower and quake with the arrival of the new tomorrow?! My decree is absolute. We will open the Zen'in clan to the most talented sorcerers in Jujutsu High who choose to sign a contract with us. We will be made all the stronger for it.”

“And what of the Kukuru unit?” one elder cried. “The Hei, the Akashi, or the Kukuru unit?! How will they accept this onslaught of newblood? The women in our ranks?!”

Naobito toned his own personality down for the good of all to deliver his most diplomatic responses, all of which boiled down to: “So fucking what?!”

He’d have his new sorcerers, whether by crook or by hook.

And especially if it made those layabout Hei and Akashi snobs—the two units that contained sorcerers with cursed techniques—finally apply themselves!

This was the Zen'in clan of tomorrow! And he would have it, even if these old fogeys conspired to kill him!

000

“In short, we can kill her. And him, for that matter.”

Zen'in Ogi smoked his pipe slowly and nodded. The three elders who sat across from him were excited. And that made him excited.

They had explained to him the plan.

It was less of a plan, really, and more of an act of heavenly providence. Everything had fallen into the laps of Ogi: the instrument through which he could finally exact his vengeance against his older brother, and against that witch Curse Empress, and the cursed tool itself—a literal instrument through which he could meet all his wildest dreams.

Ogi was confident. They could do it. They could do it all.

“Fine,” Ogi grinned, sucking on his pipe. He let out a fat plume of smoke that he hoped would conceal his eyes. “Come the exchange event, Jujutsu Society will change forevermore. And the earth spiders will once more be returned back from whence they came.”

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A/N: Earth spiders means tsuchigumo, which is another word for rogue clans. He’s referring to the Hibana clan.