Miyagi Prefecture, minutes before Satoru meets Yuriko
He saw the flare of its cursed energy, ambling along at a pace near-human; a foot forward at a time. Then he was there; blindfold loosened so only one eye was visible.
When he winked back into reality, Gojo Satoru was standing with his back facing an apartment complex. Ijichi Kiyotaka dropped to his feet beside him.
"You're good with collecting the statements, right?" he asked his colleague. The man in question let out a long suffering sigh.
"I'll text you all the details, Gojo-san."
"Eh, this shouldn't take long."
Satoru regarded the curse with a professional curiosity. It waddled like a bear woke up one day at tried its hand at bipedalism. One foot; two foot. It caught itself between each step. Now Satoru was amending his evaluation. The curse was
walking the way a toddler did, like it was trying to tap into an instinct that should have been a given.
Humanoid. Presenting as female. An Imaginary or a Vengeful?
A cloud-like fog of black dust devoured the space around them and he could just about make out each individual grain. She seemed to make the ambient environment pliant to her power.
The curse stood as a patchwork of a metal he had never seen before, dust, water vapour and incongruous swathes of cursed energy. Everything from the air to the ground below was refining her form as she walked as each layer of new material added in turn another layer of precision and personality to her gait. And then there was the blood, etched into her metallic, hominid form, from her face down through her crude reconstruction of clothing. Crystallised remains of the people she
had simply walked through.
It was an amalgam technique, that much was clear, but he couldn't work out the vector by which the power was carried. He could intuit from her sheen that the metal seemed to be the binding agent, but the intricacies between the hows and whys were lost on him.
"Ma—Mayuri," her voice came out robotic like a phone call under poor signal.
Definitely a Vengeful.
It didn't change what needed to be done.
"Yikes, your ex? Girl, we told you he was no good." His breath came out foggy.
The curse raised her head, giving him a more complete picture of her face. For a moment, what constituted eyes for the curse widened when she saw him. Recognition, before apathy slammed into place. A wave of metal—that he could only see because of who he was— surged from behind her toward the building. She continued to walk as though he weren't there.
Satoru took exception to that.
Power thrummed through his body, and suddenly, they both were airborne. His right fist still clenched from the uppercut. Gojo Satoru spun mid-air, his head facing the ground, and splayed his fingers.
"Blue."
The convergent series sprung to life in his hand. Residential area. Low output.
As soon as the wave brushed the building's facade, it was seized by the inescapable pull.
Satoru threw the sphere into the air, amplifying it the higher up it went. The curse was also caught in the well of turbulent space, careening with its constructs and all, into a cloud.
He smiled, but that was before he looked down.
Gone. The entire facade of the apartment complex was simply gone. He hadn't done that. He'd been careful.
Satoru frowned, as its inhabitants spilled out in a pandemonium. One man in particular tried to push past Kiyotaka on his way out.
A burst of cursed energy drew his attention back. Spikes of ice fired from the cloud like a turret. No, it was more accurate to say that
the cloud was becoming the spikes, glistening white columns with a silver hue to them. They crashed into Infinity, ultimatelyaccomplishing nothing. Satoru waved a hand, and they shattered in front of him.
That was when he saw the curse again, swaying in the air like a leaf on a stream.
"I haven't just taught you that you can fly, have I?" He sighed.
Blue took an arm and a leg from her, but already they were growing back. Satoru's eyes narrowed as he realised she was recovering with her technique, and not with raw cursed energy as other curses did.
"Go—Gojo Satoru."
"Oh?"
"Strongest. Exorcise later. Let me..." She inclined her head to the building below.
Bargaining, and an admirable attempt at it too. What he was dealing with wasn't mindless.
"I'll tell you what," he replied, crossing his fingers behind his back. "Just sit still and make it easier for me to pop ya, and I'll
kill whomever it was that wronged you."
"You. Lie."
"Worth a shot." He shrugged.
The metal curse was floating in the remnants of the cloud.
The metal curse was eye to eye with Satoru as a sonic boom rocked the city.
The temperature dropped. Herons tumbled out of the sky en masse.
Satoru leaned and let her shoot past him, grabbing her 'hair' as she went. He pulled her back in range of his left hand, throwing
punch, after punch.
Pieces of her fell to wayside, caught in the attractive force of Blue and was crushed.
Then metallic grains trilled, and Satoru threw her away.
"What the..."
He clasped his hands together and reappeared five metres higher. A dome of that metal encompassed the space he'd been floating in. He watched with his Six Eyes as oxygen molecules depleted rapidly, becoming either blocks of solid, or—ozone.
She'd been trying to suffocate him.
Satoru sized the curse up as she literally started pulling herself together again. If he had a hundred yen for every enemy he'd faced that had a viable strategy for him, he'd have three hundred. Which wasn't a lot, but
it was concerning for everyone else that it happened thrice.
A notification pinged from his pocket. Satoru read the message on his phone—as efficient as ever, Kiyotaka. He already had a name. Satoru texted a quick 'stay away,' then shifted his focus back to the
task.
"Got a name, ma'am?" The curse was simply too intelligent to not have a sense of identity. There was only one thing she could have been: a sorcerer who simply died the wrong way.
"Hatsu...ko."
"First daughter, huh? Your parents had no sense of adventure."
No response, but that was fine. Satoru analysed the surroundings. It wasn't just the cloud; Hatsuko was changing the entire environment to suit her needs better; and the better they met her needs, the less they would meet the needs of everything with lungs.
A curse had no need to breathe, and the cold clearly didn't bother this one anyway. He looked down at the city below—the effects hadn't spread far enough for it to be a problem yet but 'yet' was very much the
operative word. He had to end things fast, so he broke the stalemate first.
Satoru pulled himself forward with a burst of Blue.
The air burned and he was in front of her. A sucker punch. The curse reeled, trying to guard its head the way a human might.
Satoru's fist turned its arm to powder, hitting her regardless. She threw a wild swing with her other palm, and though he had no need dodge, he was already moving. His fingers wrapped a vice-grip around her remaining wrist as he planted a foot on her abdomen. A similar dome was starting to form around them. Too slow.
"Red."
Space-time bulged, and the distance between them widened with a rush of wind. Satoru came away arm and all as Hatsuko careened through the night. Her arm crumbled to its constituent parts, as it slipped through his fingers and fell out of her influence.
He propelled himself forward with Blue again, and the gap between them closed. Spikes shot out from her body—Satoru vanished just before they could even try to touch him, reappearing from her blindside.
Conservation of momentum. Their combined mass cratered a cloud as they tumbled through the skies of Sendai.
If she's changing her surroundings to favour her? Change the surroundings. He wouldn't give her the time to get comfortable. To adapt.
Satoru threw an elbow, a Blue enhanced body blow—a feint into an uppercut. The works.
A few rounds later and he was holding her head in his right hand. Nothing below the neck remained.
"Not gonna lie. This was some good exercise. It's good to get out and get the blood pumping." He rolled his shoulders. "You would have been a worthy competitor if I was—"
And then he saw her, just not directly.
The fight had taken him and the curse from one side of the city, to the other, but damn. If he hadn't been wearing his blindfold when they arrived in Sendai, he wouldn't have missed it at all. Is she even trying to hide?
Suguru's wannabe foundling, and the unfettered mass of cursed energy that more than enveloped the space around her. Like Leviathan thrashing in a kiddie pool. How had she not been discovered sooner? She was practically a supernova under a microscope.
No matter. He saw her now, and he could tell from the way her energy shifted, and compressed like a spring under stress, that she saw him too.
"Well, then, I guess that's my cue to end this," he said.
"Yuriko..."
Huh?
Something soft seeped into Hatsuko's face; her metallic features became more malleable. A widening of her 'eyes,' here, a gentle tug at her lips there. Then like a switch was flipped, there was fury.
Hatsuko glared at him with such intensity, such hatred, that a lesser man would have would have sublimated on the spot. Her cursed energy—what remained of it—spat off her form like water hitting a hot pan.
"Sorcerer," she glowered. "Turn away."
"You know her, don't you?"
"Leave."
The curse in his hand struggled with renewed, desperate vigour. Her face began to shrink. Nanoscopic filaments of material sheared off what remained of her. Like they were playing 'the Daruma-Doll-Fell-Over'—like Infinity could turn away, or blink, even— they tried to close the distance between
Hatsuko and the arm that held her.
Satoru felt a flicker of admiration, and then jealousy. An idle thought considered if his own mother had ever, or even would ever struggle for him in the same way, before he squashed it.
"It's no use," he whispered. "I've never met anyone so desperate that they managed to draw blood from a stone."
And he was right. But it wasn't desperation that drew his blood. A premonition ran along his spine.
One moment, Satoru was as he was. Inviolable and unapproachable.
The next? He felt the space around his arm break off and become a part of something that had no interest in keeping him safe.
The instant the first grain touched his arm, it seeped into his cursed energy, propagating a metallic sheen that was rapidly spreading in only fractions of a second. His cursed energy stagnated. Became sluggish.
Became other as the effect travelled down his sleeve and arm.
Satoru reacted a second before it reached his elbow—
"Red."
And the thing that used to be his right arm exploded along with Hatsuko.
A few facets of the interaction became clear to him as he floated there alone.
He had almost died.
Anyone else in his position certainly would have.
He hadn't deactivated Infinity.
It had neither turned away, nor had it blinked. No. If Limitless was the game's master, and they were in fact playing the 'Daruma-Doll-Fell-Over', then the curse known as Hatsuko had simply grabbed a pistol, and shot through both its eyes.
Satoru thought about the apartment building. Devastated by the faintest of touches. That could have been him.
Gojo Satoru, the strongest sorcerer of the modern age, breathed a world-weary sigh. His reserves flared, and with a precision that
could only be attained with the Six Eyes, negatives collided and multiplied
upon themselves, and in their place spawned positive energy.
A sense of euphoria flooded his veins. Micro
tears in myofibrils repaired instantly, his breath hitched as breathing itself
became easier.
The daily wear and tear, that even Limitless could do nothing to mitigate, faded away like a lie. He was bleeding exhaustion. Yet,
when that same energy flowed to what remained of his right arm, it began to
stall. Gojo grit his teeth and redoubled his efforts. Cells were dividing, skin uncauterised.
"Damn, that's slow" he groaned. "Well—" and he scanned the surroundings and teleported a few times to make sure—"At least it's gone now."
His shoes clicked as they tapped the ground.
"Yuriko, huh?" He smiled. Then his left knuckles met the door.