Chapter Text
Commissioned artwork by @tomiokamon
The mission to Kamikōchi had come directly from Satoru Gojo.
Northwest of Tokyo, tucked deep in the Japanese Alps, Kamikōchi was well known for its turquoise rivers, waterfalls spilling through deep valleys, rugged mountain peaks winding like serpents through the landscape, and tall forests teeming with life. The region within Chūbu-Sangaku National Park was so beloved that even on chilly September days, its walkways and trails were still packed with hikers and tourists alike.
Instead, in an unprecedented string of gruesome murders, it was now closed off to the public. To the average investigator, it may have looked like a serial killer carrying out an unknown vengeance. But with the nature of the deaths, this matter no longer belonged in the hands of ordinary law enforcement. It belonged to Jujutsu headquarters. And to the sorcerer who arrived on the scene, the mystery was less vague. Each victim was found veiled in traces of cursed energy.
He’d warned her it wouldn’t be simple. These wilderness excursions never were, but that's why she'd been trained, specialized for long days tracking unusual curses through difficult terrain. The idea had been fostered by Gojo a few years back after she’d struggled with her technique on missions around Tokyo. And it hadn’t taken long for her to grow accustomed to these solo treks, the independence, and the primal thrill of hunting down her target. This was what she was good at, where she thrived.
She hadn’t expected to end up flat on her back in the dirt, lungs burning as she tried to drag in ragged gasps of air, useless beneath the boot crushing her ribs. She writhed with all the strength she had, fingers digging into leather, desperately trying to shove off the pressure grinding her into the damp forest floor.
The looming figure, once bathed in moonlight, was now a menacing silhouette. His dark and unruly hair stuck up in two crests, resembling devilish horns in the black of night. He watched her struggle, pinning her effortlessly as if she were no more than a small, squirming creature.
Her cursed energy flared to life but had nowhere to go. The water pouches, still clipped to her chest harness, were soundly trapped beneath the sole of his boot and her chest. She couldn't pull water from them. Couldn’t reach her discarded axes a few paces away either.
Come on, dammit… do something! shrieked the desperate voice in her mind. Dark crept in at the edges of her vision, and her panic increased, cutting sharply through the pain. No, she wasn’t going to pass out. Wasn’t going to go out like this.
Above her, he stood steady, flat voice ringing out into the cold night air.
"And what do you think you're doing, sorcerer?"
Two days earlier
At this point, Yaga had stopped trying to send Ijichi or the other assistants to collect her. She liked the small ritual of commuting out to Jujutsu Tech–stretching her legs, grabbing something from the konbini, and hopping into the train. Headphones in and staring out the window, it felt like watching the city be disassembled. Glass and concrete gave way to blockier, run-down apartment buildings, which were then replaced by well-built houses with traditional roofs and gardens. Eventually, green hills rolled up, dotted with scattered buildings that grew sparser by the minute. Somehow, all of it, still within the bounds of Tokyo.
She watched as the low-lying mountains rose closer as she neared her destination. With the whole car to herself, she broke custom by finally sipping her drink. On a weekday, when all the residents were on their way to school and work, no one was heading out to this patch of nature bordering the city. All the more reason she enjoyed the little journey.
Tokyo had never been her style, but she’d chosen her own apartment in its city sprawl, regardless. The technical college grounds were beautiful, convenient, peaceful, and protected by veil and nature alike, but there… she always felt on duty, never able to fully relax. Having to converse with anyone who walked by, whether student, colleague, or administrative sort, she knew them all. It wasn’t a bad thing living within a community. Still, for her, it was necessary to have her own space, autonomy over her furnishings and her food, and not to be readily available for socializing about curses, training, gossip, or, can you believe, the higher-ups this and the clans that. Ugh.
The train rolled to a stop, a cheery voice naming the station in Japanese and English before the doors slid open to a vacant platform. She crossed over a craggy strip of pavement that quickly disintegrated to gravel and dirt as she made her way towards the mountain. A wooden signpost with worn kanji stood at the trailhead directing visitors to three different hiking routes in the area. Breezing past, she took a left and less than a minute later, a right, shoving past two large bushes and up a trodden stone path through the tall grasses. For those like her, who enjoyed the small trek, began the unmarked route concealed by landscape, not sorcery.
After passing through the sloped meadow, the ‘abandoned trail,’ leading to the ‘abandoned shrine,’ revealed itself as she hit the forest's edge. The stones were weathered by age and use, but the route was now clear, marked by brilliantly painted torii gates spanning each section of the path. Birch trees crowded in on either side, the air flowing through crisp and breezy, accompanied by the sounds of birds protesting her arrival and water trickling from a nearby stream. A massive upgrade from the nonstop hum of the city. Practiced enough to do the steps in her sleep, she moved on autopilot, mind wandering and gaze drifting.
At the top, an impossibly large torii gate greeted her as she crossed onto flat cobblestone. The whirr of Tengen’s veil prickled over her skin as she moved through the invisible barrier and onto the grounds. The autumnal trees, speckled with vibrant yellows, reds, and oranges, opened up to reveal a cluster of old wooden buildings and dark-tiled roofs tucked into the mountainside, with tiered pagodas rising above the trees. Tokyo Jujutsu Technical College. The place she’d called home for ten years.
“Is our wild boar ready to embark on another mission?” Gojo chimed from his desk as soon as she entered. Snow-white hair stuck up around the band of his dark blindfold, and his head rested on his clasped hands, elbows propped on the desk. His smile was broad, none of those perfectly white teeth showing yet, but it was coming. She could see it as soon as she walked in. He was up to something.
Pausing to close the door behind her, she squinted, sweeping over the room. The office should have looked dignified, with its polished wood, old beams, and the large, round window behind him, offering the best view on campus. Even that ridiculous designer chair he’d dragged in looked like a small throne amidst the old architecture. The only thing that could disturb it was the office’s owner, who at the moment was clearly in nest mode.
A box of half-eaten mochi, case files scattered across the desk and some of the shelves—none of them his reports, because he never did paperwork—And at the center of the mess, sat the Strongest sorcerer of them all, poised like a hawk. She knew him well enough. The look on his face was too eager. He was in a mood. A dangerous Satoru mood.
Bored.
It was necessary to approach with caution during such times. His teasings could last hours, and ignoring him only made things worse. She'd seen Nanami nearly go mad from it once and had learned over time that a calculated approach to his games was the only way to survive the day.
Dropping into the chair across him, her tone was professionally unamused. “For the thousandth time, Gojo... I am not a wild boar.”
“Don’t be so grumpy,” he replied, flashing a grin. “It’s a term of endearment.”
There’s the teeth, she thought.
He leaned back and pulled a mochi free from the wrapper, uncaring of the powder drifting onto the papers below. Popping it into his mouth in a single bite, he spoke as he chewed. “mmm' for our favorite feral sorcerer, s’doing the dirty work the rest of f’us are too soft for.”
Satoru appeared his usual laid-back, breezy self, but his cursed energy was practically reverberating. She’d been gone for a long assignment, and clearly he hadn’t gotten the attention he needed or the warm body to annoy and extract dopamine from in her absence. Tread carefully.
“Gojo… I just got back from Hokkaido yesterday. You know… the one you swore was going to be a breeze?” Two fingers raised for emphasis. “Two and a half weeks. Two and a half weeks in the sticks. There was a total infestation of curses there. Low-level. But a lot of the annoying bastards." She waved a hand dismissively. "I barely had a chance to rest, and haven't even started on the paperwork.”
"See? You're thorough. That's why you're always booked." Another wrapper drifted down onto the mess. "You do the jobs most sorcerers can't. I mean, the rest of us are too civilized for worms and dirt."
Yeah. Civilized, says the grown man with rice powder all over his manicured fingers.
She reached over, snatching the mochi from his hand, trying to maintain her glower as he froze in a comical position of shock. “We can’t all be nepo babies, Gojo. Besides, you set me up with this job anyway. Clearly, only to make fun of me the rest of my career.”
As she bit into the mochi, teeth tearing through the chewy layers of rice and soft strawberry filling, he leaned forward, watching her eat in silence. Even with the blindfold on, she’d known him long enough to read his microexpressions. Well, in general, there was probably no one else she knew better. He glared now, serious and still, and this, more than anything, almost made her crack. It took effort to keep her lips straight as she finished the second bite.
“Insubordination,” he declared, sticking a finger out in accusation. “You owe me now.”
“Well, I wonder who I learned that from," she chuckled, brushing the powder from her fingers before gesturing over the desk. “But why do I have to do this? You don’t look all that busy since I’ve been gone.”
“On the contrary,” he replied, sitting up straighter and throwing his arms out with dramatic flair as he acted out the story. “I have been very busy. You remember Yuji? Well, he died. Then he didn’t. I kept that second part a secret from the higher-ups while I trained him, and then there was the Kyoto Sister Goodwill Event. School got attacked, I handled it, massive hole in the forest now—”
“Gojo!”
Beneath where his thumb held his pointer and middle finger down, a tiny purple ball whirled, shining brilliantly with more destructive force than she could ever possess. The small mass seemed to both pull and repel her clothes as it rattled the loose paperwork. “Gojo, what the hell? You can’t just drop all of that on me. Why didn’t you say anyth–and put that away!”
"C'mon, that doesn't even scare you anymore," he chuckled, as the minuscule show of his power, Purple, dissipated. “You just got back. Had to find out somehow. But look, we’ll talk about all that later.”
Before she could argue, he made a sound between his teeth. leaning forward on his elbows again. “Two things. I know this assignment isn’t fair. But hear me out, it's a serious one and recent. You know Kamikōchi up in Nagano? HQ already closed it, and some lameass from Kyoto is investigating, but you know anybody besides you or Nanami is a lost cause.”
That such action had already been taken was a surprise. What story were they spinning to cover this up? “Okay, I’m listening. What’s been happening?”
“Missing hikers. A few dead animals. Weird wounds. Cursed residuals everywhere.”
Somehow, in the chaos atop his desk, he pinched her exact case from a random stack, pulling it out and flipping it open. Her nose wrinkled at the pictures. Nothing she hadn’t seen before, but still, that didn’t make it any more normal as she examined the gruesome corpses. Most slashed. A hole punched clean through another’s head. The wounds didn’t appear to be from claws or teeth, and there was an excess of blood in every photo.
She jumped as he slammed the folder shut. A self-satisfied look was plastered over his blindfolded face as he crossed his arms and leaned back, leather squeaking as it absorbed his weight. “I see I’ve piqued your interest. Perfect for our forest assassin, right?”
"Yeah... probably just some tweaked-out curse user again,” she muttered, but it was more of a false annoyance. Her mind was already puzzling over what kind of curse had attacked these people, then turning to the logistics of the trip. Grabbing the file, she rose from the chair. “Fine. Fine. I'm going. But I want overtime out of your paycheck.”
“Hey, hey, slow down, boarbrain,” Gojo said, matching her as he stood and crossed over in two strides. “I didn’t tell you the second thing yet.”
“What?”
"You’re right. You do need rest. So you’re going tomorrow. Not today. Meanwhile, your good friend Satoru is going to get you caught up on everything that happened while you were gone.” Her stomach fluttered as he stood before her, slightly too close for what was appropriate. He tilted his head, voice sliding into something silkier. “As for your payment… I think I can offer something of equal value."
Even though she desperately wished she had the power to suppress it, her breath did the little thing it did whenever he got like this. She tried to act nonchalant, ignoring the not-so-subtle innuendo. "Sorry to hurt your feelings, but not even your dick is worth dying for. I want the bonus."
"You're right." His head dipped, a small downward tilt she'd learned to read over the years, the one that meant the teasing had stopped being teasing. "How about this then? Since you're so hardworking... Not to mention my favorite. I'll give you both.”
No. Tell him no, she thought, a final, feeble resistance as she jerked her face to the side. Don’t look at him, he’s gon–
Two of his fingers caught her chin, guiding her back. Yep. It was over. His free hand caught the blindfold, dragging it up over his head. The white strands of hair fell infuriatingly, as they did every time, in perfect, tousled order around his face. Worse. The point of the reveal. To beam his godforsaken Six Eyes directly into her soul.
Those ridiculously blue eyes, luminescent and glowing, lit the sharp edge of his nose, brow, and cheek. Turquoise, periwinkle, and aquamarine shades crisscrossed in his irises, sparkling with an otherworldly beauty. His smile softened into something almost sweet, thick white lashes lowering as he tilted his face toward hers, shamelessly pretty and insufferably aware of it.
“Satoru… stop,” she all but wheezed out.
“Stop what?”
“Weaponizing your face.”
“It’s one of my better techniques,” he mused with a small laugh, drawing her closer. “So it’s a deal?”
She let his hand settle around her waist as her fingertips smoothed over his dark uniform jacket. “You are so manipulative”
"You love it," he teased, mouth brushing hers before she met his lips in a kiss.
