Three days before everything went to hell, I was in the training yard with a split lip and a question.
The split lip was from Maki. She'd decided my defensive form was "passive-aggressive" and corrected it with the butt of her staff. The question was for Gojo, who was leaning against the fence, munching on pocky and offering exactly zero helpful advice.
"Sensei."
"Mmm?"
"Healing. How does it work? Like, real healing. Not just slapping a bandage on it and hoping."
He crunched a stick, thoughtful. "Reverse Cursed Technique? Oh, it's easy!"
That was my first warning. Nothing is easy when Gojo says it is.
"You just take your normal cursed energy flow," he said, waving his pocky like a conductor's baton, "and you multiply it by itself! But, like, in reverse! Negative times negative equals positive! Healing vibes! Boom!" He made a little explosion gesture with his fingers.
I stared. "That's not how math works. Or energy. Or… anything."
"Sure it is! It's all about the vibes! Most people can't do it 'cause their brains are the size of a walnut! But you!" He pointed the half-eaten pocky at my head. "You've got a supercomputer in there! You'll figure it out! Probably!"
He tossed the empty box into a trash can thirty feet away without looking and strolled off, whistling.
I touched my throbbing lip. Multiply by itself in reverse. What the actual hell did that even mean?
[Initiating analysis,] Great Sage intoned. [Metaphor is logically inconsistent but may contain a symbolic kernel. 'Multiplying in reverse' suggests inverting the polarity of cursed energy flow. Cross-referencing with observed somatic repairs in Subject Gojo and Subject Ieiri… Hypothesis: Generating an identical but inversely polarized energy current within the host's own system may stimulate cellular regeneration.]
"So you're saying… run the electricity backwards."
[A crude but serviceable analogy. Warning: This would require energy output comparable to maintaining a Simple Domain for an extended period. And precise neural control you do not currently possess.]
"Great. So I can't do it."
[I did not say that. I said you lack the control. I can provide the control. Your job is to provide the energy and not pass out.]
Later that night, in my room, I got a papercut from a mission report. A stupid, tiny line of red on my thumb.
"Okay," I muttered. "Let's try the stupid reverse math."
I focused. Cursed energy hummed under my skin, a familiar blue current in my mind's eye thanks to Sage's HUD. Now… the opposite.
It was like trying to breathe in while also breathing out. Like trying to swallow and vomit at the same time. My brain screamed in protest. My cursed energy sputtered, recoiling from the contradiction.
[Host is attempting to oppose the flow using conscious will. Inefficient. Allow me.]
A sudden, icy clarity washed over my mind. It wasn't me doing it anymore. It was Sage, piloting my nervous system like a complex machine. I felt my own energy seized, routed down pathways I didn't know existed, twisted, and forced to flow backwards along an identical parallel track.
A spark. Then a sickening, warm-cold sensation, like dipping my hand in menthol and battery acid.
A faint, shimmering, pale green light, nothing like the blue of my normal energy, coated my thumb. The papercut sealed. Not healed. Sealed. Like it had never been. Not even a mark.
The light vanished. I slumped forward, grabbing the edge of my desk, gasping. I felt like I'd just sprinted a mile while doing calculus. My cursed energy reserves had dipped noticeably.
"What… the hell…"
[Reverse Cursed Technique: Basic Application successful. Efficiency: 3.2%. Energy cost: Prohibitive for major injuries. Note: The sensation of 'warm-cold' is the negation of entropy in localized tissue. Do not attempt on severed limbs. The energy requirement would cause host's heart to explode.]
I looked at my perfect thumb. A laugh, slightly hysterical, bubbled in my throat. I'd just reversed entropy on a papercut. By running my soul's electricity backwards.
Gojo was a lunatic. And Sage was a miracle worker.
"Don't tell anyone," I whispered.
[Understood. This will be our little secret. And our emergency 'oh god I'm dying' button.]
========================
The mission scroll arrived on a Tuesday. The paper felt heavy, cheap, and smelled like dread.
LOCATION: Abandoned Juvenile Detention Center, District 7.
OBJECTIVE:Investigate mass disappearances. Confirm presence of rumored Special Grade cursed object. EXORCISE ALL HOSTILES.
TEAM:Fushiguro Megumi (Scout/Point). Itadori Yuji, Kugisaki Nobara, Ishiguro Kaito (Reinforcements).
THREAT LEVEL:SPECIAL GRADE.
The last two words were stamped in red ink that looked too much like blood.
Yuji read it over my shoulder, his usual grin absent. "Special Grade? Like… the big ones?"
"The ones that make messes," I said, folding the scroll. My stomach was a cold knot. Sage was running silent calculations in the back of my skull.
Nobara snatched the scroll from my hand, scanned it, and smirked. "Finally. A real challenge. I'm tired of those sad, grey little ghosts."
Megumi was already waiting at the gates, his face a mask of grim focus. "The energy coming from that place is wrong," he said without preamble. "I scouted the perimeter. It's not just a curse. It's… a nest. I've called it in. We're the cleanup."
The ride there was silent. The detention center wasn't on the edge of town; it was the edge. A monolithic slab of stained concrete and rusted bars, squatting in a field of dead grass under a sky the color of bruised flesh. The air didn't get colder as we approached. It got heavier. Thick. Hard to breathe.
My new vision showed it. The building wasn't shrouded in cursed energy. It was pulsing with it. A deep, bruise-purple heartbeat that made my teeth ache.
[Energy signature confirmed. Special Grade Cursed Spirit, evolved class. Designation: 'Finger-Bearer'. Secondary objective confirmed: Sukuna's Finger is present. Threat level: Maximum. Host's RCT may be relevant. Probability of Sukuna's direct intervention: 42.7%. Rising.]
"Cheery," I muttered.
We found the hole Megumi had made to get inside. The interior was a cathedral of decay. Peeling paint, broken furniture, and a silence so complete it felt like a physical weight. Our footsteps echoed like gunshots.
Then the echoes changed. They multiplied. They came from the wrong directions.
Shadows detached from the walls. Not curses. Not yet. The remains of curses. Dozens of them, half-digested, twisted things, crawling and mewling. They weren't attacking. They were fleeing. Scrambling away from something deeper inside.
"They're scared," Yuji whispered, his fists clenched.
"Something's herding them," Megumi said, his voice tight. "Or… digesting them."
We pushed deeper. The hallway opened into a vast central chamber, maybe a former cafeteria. And in the center, hovering above a mound of… stuff… was it.
The Finger Bearer.
It was wrong in a way that bypassed eyes and went straight to the lizard brain. A humanoid shape stretched and knotted like taffy, skin the color of a dead fish's belly. Its limbs ended in too many joints. Its head was a featureless oval, save for a single, vertical mouth that split its torso from collarbone to groin, lined with rotating, needle-like teeth. The air around it shimmered and warped, like looking through old glass.
At its feet, pulsing with a malice so profound it was a physical ache, was a shriveled, blackened finger.
The thing's head, or where a head should be, turned toward us. The mouth on its stomach opened wider.
No sound came out. The space in front of it folded.
"DOWN!" I roared.
We scattered. The wall behind where we'd been standing didn't crack. It smeared, the concrete and steel twisting into an impossible spiral before crumbling to dust.
"What the hell was that?!" Nobara yelled, already flipping a nail in her hand.
"Spatial distortion!" Megumi's hands were already moving. "Don't let it hit you! It won't just cut, it'll unravel you!"
The fight was a nightmare. Yuji charged, his speed unbelievable. He got inside its guard and landed a punch that would have cratered a truck. The Finger Bearer's flesh rippled, absorbed the impact, and a whip-like limb of distorted space lashed out. Yuji twisted, but it grazed his side, tearing his jacket and leaving a bleeding line that looked less like a cut and more like a void in his skin.
Nobara's nails flew. They hit, but their resonance seemed muted, dampened by the warped space around the creature. "It's like punching fog!"
Megumi summoned his Divine Dogs. They lunged, shadows and fangs. The Finger Bearer didn't dodge. A sphere of warped space expanded around it. The Divine Dogs hit it and were slowed, their movements becoming dream-like, before being batted away.
My turn. I didn't go for the body. I went for the technique. As it prepared another spatial fold, I focused on the point of conception, the "idea" of the fold, and bit down with Predator.
Snap.
The fold started, then fractured, collapsing in on itself with a sound like shattering crystal. The Finger Bearer shuddered, its blank head tilting in my direction. Interest. Annoyance.
It focused on me.
A barrage. Not one distortion, but half a dozen, coming from all angles. I wove through them, using micro-bursts of Predator to eat the "cutting" edge off each one, turning lethal slices into blunt force impacts that still bruised bone and rattled my brain. I was a mosquito, buzzing, annoying, surviving by a hair's breadth.
Then I got clever. I dodged a little too slow.
A ribbon of distorted space, sharper and faster than the others, caught me across the midsection.
There was no pain at first. Just a cold, profound wrongness. Then the pain hit, white-hot and total. I looked down.
My uniform was sliced clean through. Underneath, from my left hip to just below my right ribcage, was a gaping, weeping tear. I could see things I was never meant to see. The world tilted. My legs gave out.
I hit the cold concrete floor. The sound of my own blood hitting the ground was louder than the battle.
Yuji's scream was distant. "SENPAI!"
[CRITICAL INJURY DETECTED. LACERATION TRANSVERSING ABDOMINAL WALL. MAJOR BLEEDING. INTESTINAL PERFORATION LIKELY. INITIATING EMERGENCY RCT PROTOCOL.]
Sage's voice was a calm, cold command in the white static filling my head. There was no panic. Just procedure.
My vision was tunneling, but I saw Yuji, roaring, throwing himself at the Finger Bearer with pure, suicidal fury. Nobara was screaming, nails flying in a desperate barrage. Megumi's shadows were rising like a tidal wave.
I couldn't help them. I was busy not dying.
Sage took over. Completely. I was a passenger in my own body. I felt my remaining cursed energy seized, wrung like a wet rag, forced into that impossible, backwards flow. The warm-cold sensation erupted from my core, a thousand times more intense than the papercut.
It wasn't healing. It was manufacturing. Forcing cells to knit, vessels to seal, tissue to regenerate at a rate that defied biology. The pain was exquisite, a symphony of agony that eclipsed the original injury. I couldn't scream. My jaw was locked.
Glowing, intricate, greenish-silver lines of light, like a mad surgeon's stitches, appeared across the terrible wound, pulling it closed from the inside out. The bleeding slowed, then stopped. The exposed… things… were pushed back in and sealed away.
It took maybe fifteen seconds. It felt like fifteen years.
The light faded. I lay there, gasping, drenched in cold sweat and my own blood, but whole. A fresh, pink, hairline scar crossed my torso, throbbing with a phantom memory of oblivion.
I pushed myself up on trembling arms. My cursed energy reserves were a ghost of themselves. I felt hollowed out.
Yuji, bleeding from a dozen gashes, saw me stand. His eyes went wide. Nobara stared, a nail halfway to her hammer.
The Finger Bearer paused, its head tilting again. Confusion from a thing that shouldn't be able to feel it.
"Okay," I croaked, my voice raw. Blood coated my teeth. "That was rude."
The fight turned. Our desperation met its confusion. Nobara, enraged, finally landed a perfect Resonance on the screaming mouth. It shuddered, its spatial field flickering. Yuji, seeing the opening, delivered an uppercut that lifted the monster off the ground. Megumi's Nue, summoned in a flash of lightning, speared it from above.
The Finger Bearer dissolved with a wet, tearing shriek.
It left only two things behind: the smell of ozone and rot, and the Finger, rolling to a stop at Yuji's feet.
He bent, picking it up. "We have to destroy this, right?"
"Yuji, don't..." Megumi started.
It was too late.
The Finger didn't break. It melted, turning into tendrils of inky, ancient smoke that snaked up Yuji's arm, into his mouth, his nose.
He gasped, staggering back.
Then he went still.
When he looked up, his eyes were different. Yellow, slit-pupiled. Ancient. A predatory smile spread across a face now marked by black tattoos. He, no, it... stretched, cracking joints that hadn't been used in a millennium.
The pressure that filled the room wasn't like the Finger Bearer's. That was a storm. This was the ocean. Deep, endless, and hungry.
Sukuna.
His gaze swept over us. Over Megumi, who stood frozen in a summoning stance. Over Nobara, who had gone pale, her hammer lowering. And then it landed on me.
His smile widened. It wasn't Yuji's smile. It was the grin of a cat that has found a mouse doing something inexplicably funny.
"You."
The word wasn't spoken. It was etched directly onto my soul.
"The little thief. I can smell it on you. That tiny, stolen crumb of my power." He took a step forward, the air cracking around him. "And now… you've learned a new trick. You stitched yourself back together. How… interesting."
He wasn't here for Megumi's potential. He was here for me.
"Let's see if you can do it again."
He didn't move. He didn't gesture. He just looked at me.
"Dismantle."
A line of nothingness appeared in the air, racing toward me. It wasn't fast. It was inevitable. I threw myself sideways. The line missed my center but caught my left arm, from shoulder to elbow.
A searing line of cold fire. My sleeve parted. So did my skin, muscle, everything down to the bone. A clean, perfect cut.
I fell, biting back a scream, clutching the ruined arm. Blood poured between my fingers.
"Heal it," Sukuna commanded, his voice a lazy, cruel drawl.
Panic. Pain. Sage's voice cut through it. [Initiating RCT. Focus.]
It was harder this time. I was drained, terrified. But the protocol was there. The warm-cold agony. The greenish light, weaker now, sputtered along the terrible cut, sealing vessels, forcing flesh to knit over the gleaming white bone. It was slow. Agonizingly slow. When it was done, a livid pink scar striped my arm. I was panting, grey spots dancing in my vision.
Sukuna laughed. A rich, genuine sound of delight. "You can! You're not just a scavenger! You're a student! This is better than I hoped!"
He took a step. The floor cracked under his foot. His focus was entirely on me now. A specimen. A toy.
"Let's see how much you can fix before you run dry."
He played with me. Not with Dismantle, but with his own cursed energy, shaped into blades, into crushing force. I dodged, blocked with weakening barriers, ate the concepts of attacks when I could. Each shallow cut, each bruising impact, I had to heal. My energy was a sinking ship. My world narrowed to pain, the next attack, and Sage's cold, desperate voice guiding the backwards flow of my dying power.
I was on my knees, my body a map of fresh scars, my vision blurring, when I had a stupid, suicidal idea.
He landed a cut on my cheek. As the cursed energy of his technique lingered in the wound, I didn't just heal it.
I used Predator on the residue. Not to eat it. To take a microscopic, trembling bite out of the shape of the energy itself, the formula for "Cleave."
It was like trying to swallow a live wire and a geometry textbook at the same time. My mind recoiled. My soul burned.
Sukuna froze.
His amusement vanished. His eyes narrowed, then blazed with something hotter than anger. Furious, incandescent interest.
"You… DARE?" His voice was a low, tectonic rumble. The playful pressure became an intent to kill. "You try to steal the very shape of my power? To learn its secrets?!"
He raised a hand. The air around it blackened, warping with pure annihilation. He was done playing. This would erase me from existence.
"I will peel that technique from your soul. And I will make you heal yourself while I do it."
He was going to kill me. Slowly.
Then, the hand twitched. Sukuna's face, Yuji's face, contorted. The black energy flickered.
"NO!" Sukuna snarled, but the voice was layered, conflicted. "Get… OUT!"
Yuji's own consciousness, a blazing, stubborn sun of sheer will, surged up from the depths. The tattoos faded. The yellow eyes bled back into brown. The crushing pressure shattered.
Yuji collapsed, hitting the ground hard, his own body once more.
The silence that followed was deafening. Broken only by Yuji's ragged sobs and Nobara's shaky breathing.
Megumi was the first to move, rushing to Yuji's side.
I just sat there on the bloody floor, my body a tapestry of fresh scars and exhaustion, my soul bruised, and a single, terrifying, incomprehensible idea now sitting in the vault of Predator, humming with ancient malice.
The ride back was a funeral procession. Yuji was unconscious, carried by a silent Megumi. Nobara was staring blankly out the window, her hammer clutched to her chest like a teddy bear.
I leaned against the window, feeling every heartbeat like a hammer blow. Sage was running a damage report. It was mostly red.
Gojo was waiting at the gates. He took one look at us, at me, specifically, at the latticework of pink scars on my arms and, torso visible through my torn clothes, and his usual grin didn't appear.
Later, after Yuji was taken to isolation and the reports were filed, he found me sitting on the steps of the dorm, staring at my hands. He sat down beside me.
"So," he said, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. "You multiplied your energy in reverse."
I nodded.
"And you took a bite out of the King of Curses." A statement.
I nodded again.
He was silent for a long time. Then he let out a low whistle. "He's really, really mad at you, Kaito." He bumped my shoulder with his. "Congrats. You've been personally adopted by a thousand-year-old disaster. It's like getting a really aggressive fan club."
I didn't have the energy to laugh.
Maki found me in the infirmary an hour later. I was sitting on the edge of a cot, Shoko Ieiri having patched up the few things my own RCT had missed. Maki didn't say anything. She just pulled up a chair, took out a whetstone and a knife, and started sharpening. The rhythmic shink-shink-shink was the only sound.
After ten minutes, she spoke without looking up. "Next time," she said, her voice flat, "don't get cut so much."
It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.
That night, lying in the dark, I traced the new scar across my stomach. It still felt warm. Foreign.
[Post-Mission Analysis Complete,] Sage's voice was softer than usual, almost weary. [Reverse Cursed Technique proficiency: 11.8%. Sukuna's 'Cleave' data fragment acquired: 0.3% analyzed. Integration hazardous. Host is now designated 'Primary Target of the King of Curses'. Survival probability recalculation in progress…]
It paused. For a long time.
[Survival probability: Unchanged.]
A faint, digital shrug.
[Host has developed a habit of attracting impossible enemies. This appears to be a core character trait. Adaptation protocols will continue. Recommendation: Sleep. Tomorrow will also be terrible.]
I closed my eyes. In the darkness behind my eyelids, I could still see those yellow, slit-pupiled eyes, blazing with furious, possessive interest.
The fight was no longer just about surviving curses. Or the higher-ups. Or Geto's remnants.
I had, through a series of bad decisions and worse luck, made myself the personal hobby of the strongest being in history.
And class was still in session.
=========================
Word Count: ~3,500
A/N: some of you maybe thinking " Why can't he just use predator and eat all his enemies or why doesn't he eat up attacks when he has predator " the reason for that you will find out in the next A/N of the next chapter.