The car came to a halt at the edge of a decaying iron gate. The manor ahead was a silhouette of jagged spires and boarded-up windows against a bruised twilight sky. An oppressive silence hung over the grounds, broken only by the groan of the gate swinging in a faint, cold breeze.
Gojo Satoru was the first out, his earlier playfulness replaced by a focused sharpness. The Six Eyes scanned the property, taking in the complex, stagnant swirls of cursed energy. "The barrier's thick," he remarked, his voice low. "And it's... layered. Like time itself is congealed in there."
Geto Suguru stepped out beside him, already summoning a small, bat-like curse that flitted into the air, its senses tuned to spiritual disturbances. "Two human signatures, faint but stable. Deep inside. And one other presence... it's not fluctuating like a normal curse. It's consistent. Almost rhythmic."
Kamo Itsuki emerged last, his eyes already cataloging the environment. The rumors of time manipulation aligned perfectly with the eerie, suspended atmosphere. This was the target. "Standard search and rescue, then," he said, though they all knew nothing about this was standard. "We breach together. Satoru, can you unravel the barrier's entry point without triggering a collapse?"
"Please," Gojo scoffed, raising a hand. His fingers moved in a subtle, complex pattern. The air in front of the manor's grand doors shimmered, then parted like a curtain being drawn back, revealing not the interior, but a wavering, tunnel-like passage. "It's a labyrinth. Space and time are folded. Neat trick."
Without another word, the three of them crossed the threshold.
The interior was wrong. The grand foyer was shrouded in deep twilight, though it should have been pitch black. Dust motes hung in the air, utterly motionless. A grandfather clock in the corner was frozen, its hands pointing to 3:17. The air was cold and dead, devoid of the usual flow of energy.
"Stay close," Geto advised, a pair of sturdy, multi-eyed curses now flanking them, providing light and scanning for spatial traps.
They moved through frozen dining rooms where meals sat half-eaten on the table, through libraries with books hovering mid-fall. The further they went, the heavier the temporal distortion became. Seconds stretched, then snapped back. They witnessed ghostly, repeating echoes of past events—a servant dropping a tray over and over, a shadow pacing the same three steps.
Then, they found them.
In a vast, circular ballroom, Utahime Iori and Mei Mei stood back-to-back, surrounded by a shimmering, honey-colored dome of light—a powerful barrier technique Utahime was maintaining. Her face was pale with strain. Outside the dome, the very air swirled in slow, syrupy vortices. Mei Mei was methodically launching coins with her Bird Strike technique, but the projectiles moved with agonizing slowness, often diverted or dissolved before reaching their target.
At the room's center floated the curse.
It was unlike any they had seen. It had no fixed form, appearing as a shifting, iridescent bubble within which scenes from different eras flickered—a medieval knight, a roaring twenties party, a future cityscape. At its core was a single, unwavering, pupil-less eye. This was the *Chrono-Phage*, a Grade 1 curse born from humanity's existential dread of time's passage and wasted moments.
It sensed their intrusion. The floating eye swiveled towards them. The air around Gojo, Geto, and Kamo immediately thickened.
"Interesting," Gojo said, feeling the drag on his movements. He flexed his cursed energy, and the slowing effect shattered around him like glass. "But not enough."
Geto sent his two curses forward. They charged, but their movements degraded into a slow-motion crawl the closer they got to the central bubble. The Chrono-Phage didn't attack; it simply let time itself defend it.
Kamo Itsuki observed, his mind racing. Direct attacks are mitigated. It consumes temporal momentum. To exorcise it, you must strike outside of time's flow, or overwhelm its capacity to manipulate a local field.
"Utahime! Mei Mei!" Geto called out, his voice sounding oddly drawn-out in the distorted space. "We're here. Can you hold?"
"We're... stable," Utahime managed, her voice thin. "But it's draining us... making us relive our worst wasted moments... psychologically..."
Mei Mei, ever pragmatic, shouted, "Its core cycles through temporal anchors! Attack when it shows the present! The eye blinks!"
On cue, the swirling bubble flickered. The historical scenes vanished, replaced for a split second by a reflection of the ballroom itself—the present moment.
"That's my cue," Gojo smirked. He didn't move. Instead, he pointed a finger. "*Azure Glimmer.*"
A needle-thin beam of pure, compressed spatial force shot forth. It ignored the slowed time, because it wasn't traveling through time in a conventional sense—it was erasing the intervening space. It struck the central eye in that fleeting present-moment window.
The Chrono-Phage shrieked, a sound like grinding tectonic plates. The viscous time field rippled violently.
"Now!" Kamo Itsuki acted. He didn't aim for the curse itself. He slammed his palm onto the floor. *"Blood Manipulation: Chrono-Lock."*
His blood spread across the floorboards not as a liquid, but as a complex, runic seal designed to stabilize energetic flow—in this case, the flow of time itself. The wildly fluctuating temporal field within the seal's boundaries suddenly stilled, pinned down.
The Chrono-Phage, its control challenged, writhed.
Geto Suguru saw his opening. He didn't summon a new curse. He unleashed one he had prepared earlier—a silent, psychic-type curse that attacked not the body, but the concept of self-awareness within a timeline. It slipped through the stabilized field and latched onto the Chrono-Phage's core.
The curse's form imploded, the myriad timelines it contained collapsing inward. With a final, silent pop, it condensed into a small, crystalline orb that pulsed with a soft, rhythmic light—a captured temporal anomaly.
The oppressive weight lifted instantly. The dust motes began to drift. The grandfather clock somewhere in the house ticked once, then resumed its steady tock.
Utahime's barrier fell, and she sagged, caught by Mei Mei. The two Kyoto students looked at their rescuers with a mixture of profound relief and residual shock.
Gojo inspected the crystalline orb now in Geto's hand. "Huh. A time-curse. That's a new one for the collection."
Kamo Itsuki retracted his blood seal, leaving no trace. His eyes, however, were on Geto. The capture had been clean. The Chrono-Phage was a uniquely powerful asset. The mission was a success, but the balance between them had subtly shifted again. Geto now held a piece of time itself.
Mei Mei, ever the analyst, looked from the orb to Kamo's now-clean floor, then to Gojo's casual posture. "Well," she said, brushing dust from her uniform. "That was efficiently done. I suppose we owe you one. But next time," she added, a glint in her eye, "try not to show off quite so much. It's bad for the market rates."
As they led the weary Kyoto students out of the manor, the normal flow of night embracing them, the unspoken truth hung in the air. Their "boring" mission had yielded a prize of immense and unknown potential. And Kamo Itsuki's plan to collect this particular specimen had, in the end, placed it directly into his friend's hands. The game, it seemed, was forever evolving.
The silence that followed Mei Mei's observation was heavier than the rubble around them. A 'Curtain'—the standard barrier all sorcerers erected at a mission site to conceal their activities from non-sorcerers—was conspicuously absent. They had just leveled a haunted house and exorcised a major curse in broad daylight, in the open.
Gojo Satoru's flippant "We're screwed" hung in the dusty air, encapsulating the gravity of the oversight. This wasn't a simple disciplinary note; it was a major breach of the most fundamental jujutsu law.
"Didn't you guys deploy one when you arrived?" Geto Suguru asked, turning to Utahime and Mei Mei, his usual calm replaced by sharp urgency.
Utahime, still clinging to Shoko, shook her head, her face pale. "We… we did. The moment we approached. But the Chrono-Phage… it didn't just manipulate time inside the house. The first thing it did was consume the concept of the barrier around its territory. Our 'Curtain' dissolved before it even fully formed. We didn't have time to report it."
Mei Mei nodded grimly, brushing debris from her sleeve. "It was an environmental effect. The entire property existed in a temporal bubble that rejected external seals. We were trapped the moment we stepped onto the grounds."
Kamo Itsuki's mind raced. The absence of a Curtain meant their entire operation—Gojo's display of power, the destruction of the manor, the visible cursed energy clashes—could have been witnessed. By non-sorcerers. By cameras. The Higher-ups' tolerance for their… eccentricities was thin at the best of times. This was a direct, flagrant violation.
"We need to contain the information. Now," Kamo stated, his voice cutting through the panic. He looked at Gojo. "Satoru. Can your Six Eyes trace any recent observation? Cameras, phones, human witnesses within visual range?"
Gojo's playful demeanor was completely gone. His eyes, now fully exposed, scanned the surrounding area with an intensity that made the air hum. "There's a security camera on a pole down the road… two residential windows with a direct line of sight… and three people. An old man walking a dog about 300 meters east, frozen stiff. A woman in a third-floor apartment, phone raised. A kid on a bicycle who just crashed into a hedge." He listed the points with chilling precision. "The camera's digital. The phone is recording. The old man and the kid are just staring."
"Geto, the camera and the phone," Kamo ordered. "Discreetly. Satoru, you and I will handle the witnesses. A light memory alteration. Shoko, stay with Utahime and Mei Mei. Assess them for any residual temporal sickness."
There was no time for debate. They moved.
Geto was a shadow, two small, swift curses darting from his sleeves. One shorted out the security camera with a tiny electrical surge. The other, a mosquito-like spirit, landed on the woman's phone just as she fumbled to stop recording, corrupting the video file instantly.
Gojo and Kamo approached the witnesses. Gojo's presence seemed to soften the air around the stunned old man and the terrified boy. "Hey there," Gojo said, his voice layered with a subtle, compelling energy. "You saw a gas main explosion, right? Pretty scary. But it's all over now. The authorities are handling it. Best to just go home and forget the details." The suggestion wove itself into their shock, overwriting the impossible sights with a plausible, mundane explanation.
Kamo approached the woman at the window. He didn't need a complex technique. A drop of blood, atomized and carried on a whisper of cursed energy, formed a mild neuro-suppressant mist. She would remember a loud noise, a blur of dust, and then a sudden, compelling need to make a cup of tea and lie down.
Within minutes, the immediate leaks were plugged. But it was a temporary fix. The physical destruction of the manor was undeniable. A "gas explosion" would only explain so much to the non-sorcerer authorities who would inevitably investigate.
As they regrouped, Yaga Masamichi's car screeched to a halt nearby. He emerged, his face like thunder. He had undoubtedly felt the massive, unshielded cursed energy discharge and put the pieces together.
"Report. Now," he growled, his single command carrying the weight of impending disaster.
Gojo, for once, had no glib reply. Geto's expression was grim. Kamo met Yaga's eyes, knowing the fallout from this would be severe. Their easy victory over the curse was now a secondary concern. They had averted a total exposure of the jujutsu world, but only just. The Higher-ups would see this not as a successful rescue, but as a catastrophic failure of protocol led by their most reckless students.
The ride back to Tokyo was spent in utter silence, the weight of their actions settling upon them. The mission was over, but the real trouble, they all knew, was just beginning.
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