'Hanako.'
Wood, chair. Glass, window. Tarmac, pavement—displacement equals—
The lower functions of her brain registered the street, as she stumbled into the road, made note of the approaching headlights, but her higher functions crunched numbers with a savagery—wind speed is... A horn blared as Yuriko stood. Drag. Thrust. Counterforce. And she was airborne.
Accelerator could have done it better. Elegantly. The pavement wouldn't have shattered. The car would have never reached his inviolable threshold, and— Yuriko took to the sky with all the grace of an inebriated loxodonta africana. Sendai and its high rises shunted away like the end credits of a low-budget documentary.
For the briefest instant, Suzushina Yuriko existed in a vacuum. Literally, the air exploded away from her. Too labile, too close to plasma for the whitelist. She had never moved that fast before. She couldn't breathe; she couldn't—Yuriko corrected the flaw.
For the briefest instant, Suzushina Yuriko existed in a vacuum. Metaphorically, she was suffocating. She would be if she didn't...if she couldn't... 'Hanako.' Codified danger; an SOS. A promise that it would be her drowning this time if she didn't...if she couldn't... Yuriko corrected the flaw in her mind. She would.
It started with Brownian motion. With one particle knocking itself to the next in the fluid that was the atmosphere. Four for stability; vortexes coalesced on her back. Gravity was disregarded for convenience. Then, she was bounding through the air like wildebeest along the Serengetti. No agility, no poise, just heat and raw panic.
She felt the cursed energy before she saw the school. Iguchi... Sasaki was exhausted... and Yuji was—malice cut through her awareness like a cleaver.
It had the same quality of the absence she had found in the thermometer shed. The metallic tang of blood, the sound of tender flesh being shorn from bone, the taste of war lacerating her tongue.
Yuriko accelerated.
***
"Who the hell are you?"
Yuriko could put two and two together. Ryoumen Sukuna. The cursed object Satoru had told her about was one of his fingers. King of Curses. In her original world, he had been a fixture of Japanese folklore. A two faced, four-armed spectre featured in the Nihon Shoki. Here, he was an ancient sorcerer who left behind a legacy of bloodshed, slaughtering entire clans and blah, blah.
All of that? Unempirical. Irrelevant. None of that knowledge would help her oust the invader from her friend's body. Yuriko knew tangentially who Ryoumen Sukuna was. She just didn't give a damn.
"Next."
He hands her a dish.
"Next."
He hands her a bowl.
Into the sink it goes. The water is an effervescent maelstrom, filling the air with just the vaguest aroma of lemon zest that off brand detergent could produce. A finger dips into the drink and the solution churns. Seconds later, the bowl breaks surface tension, shining and immaculate. Yuriko taps its exterior and sets the dry plate aside.
"This is cool and all, but can't we just wash 'em the regular way?"
"The regular way is slower, and 'this' cuts down on the wastewater."
"Maybe... It's just. I said I'd help you out. 'This'—"
"Next."
"—doesn't really feel like 'helping,'" he says, handing her a teacup.
Her calculations fumble at the incredulity. Yuriko spares a sidelong glance at the idiot boy whose face not only belies his sincerity but further cements her incredulity. "You are helping."
If it wasn't for him... If it wasn't for her... If it wasn't for them...
She reaches for the cup a little a little too quickly—
"Woah!"
And a metaphysical interaction slaps Yuji's fingers free.
Yuriko hums. That wouldn't do. "Guess I should work on adding exceptions...hang on, actually...it shouldn't be too har—there." She lifts a free palm, dropping the other and the mug into the sink. The motion begins again. "High...fly?"
Yuji stares and she can see the proverbial cogs clinking around in his head. She respected that about him, how he always seemed to try his best when it came to doing the things he actually wanted to do. How one of the "things" was trying to understand her. And when he chuckles it is the lightest, warmest ripple of air she has heard in years.
"High five!" he corrects, dismissing the malaprop without an ounce of judgment.
And then, without an ounce of fear, his palm collides with hers. The sound it makes is a new experience.
So, when she said ''who the hell are you,' what Yuriko had meant was 'who the hell do you think you are?' Did he even know whose body he'd stolen? Kind Itadori Yuji, earnest Itadori. Yuji, a phenomenon she was still trying to study. He had found her at her lowest. Opened his home to her when she had nowhere else to stay. Taught her what loneliness was by introducing her to companionship. All without ever asking for a damn thing in return.
Itadori Yuji was worth a thousand Sukunas. And now he was here, in front of her, wearing Yuji's skin and answering her demand with a bearing so painfully common—a smirk, cocky, arrogant beyond belief—like he deserved to be there.
"Bow," he ordered.
Arrogant. Unimpeded by the presence of her cursed energy which presently dwarfed his own. Her 15.4 'Megumi's to his 3.6. These were all variables she took in as she assessed him.
His smile darkened, when Yuriko responded with a look that she usually reserved for Satoru. "No."
It happened too quickly.
The lateral wave had barely registered against her reflection, but she understood it as it did. What was there to understand? An edge. A curved line as sharp and as mocking as the smirk on his face.
Yuriko was familiar with knives. She had practically run the kitchen after her mother passed. If she hadn't picked up the knife, Mayuri wouldn't have survived in those first few months. Force divided by area, slicing through carrots, putting apples in a more pliant state for a mouth that wasn't pliant with its starving body. This too using knives that had worn from constant use. Yuriko had been splitting syrup sandwiches when that had been all she knew how to make.
All this to say that, in front of her reflection his 'blade' and its analogous kitchen utensil were equally blunt.
By the time Yuriko felt the cursed energy in his fingers, Sukuna's chest—Yuji's chest— was spilling red into the soil.
Point-to-point. Euclidean. It wasn't a contest.
Honestly, it was taking considerably more effort to stanch Iguchi's amputation. The slightest flicker of contact with the heel of her shoe, a vague grasp on fluid dynamics were the only things keeping him from bleeding out. Unsustainable. She only had fifteen minutes when she extended her power beyond its passive capabilities. He needed a hospital.
"Oh?" he said, new interest burning in his eyes. "Good." He was smiling again. All canines, amusement bleeding from his stature as he traced the wound. "Very good." His skin bubbled and the cut dematerialised. "But why didn't you aim higher?"
"Fushiguro." The boy jumped behind her. "Know how to make a tourniquet?"
Yuriko seized the vectors of a hundred interactions all around her. The tremors running through the ground, the wind, dipole level interplays.
"I-yeah."
Sukuna's technique like the edge of a blade. Iguchi bleeding from the stump. Yuriko could put two and two together. Power smouldered under her skin, and her jaws clenched.
"Good. Stop the bleeding. Call an ambulance. This shouldn't take long."
Sukuna hummed, his face the epitome of self-assurance. "You're right, it won't."
Yuriko inhaled.
She needed to not hear tone wearing that voice. She needed to knock him the fuck out. Sukuna's very first act had taken Iguchi's arms away from him—could they be saved? Satoru said—. His second destroyed a perfectly serviceable article of clothing, and his third had been attempted murder.
Sukuna could not be allowed a fourth. Not in Yuji's body.
To that end, the exception known as Itadori Yuji was mercilessly purged from her whitelist. She bit the inside of her cheek.
Satoru would know what to do afterward. Didn't he have a whole cabal of magical cultists behind him, or something?
Think later. Act now.
The world blurred, and suddenly Yuriko's palm was 'high fiving' Sukuna's jawbone—it was easier to think of it as Sukuna's. Four eyes locked onto her in an instant.
She recognised the look; had learnt to after years of necessity.
The elation of his release after fuck-knows however long and the dopamine high that entailed; both had died so definitively, that they could be carbon dated. Sukuna's lips shifted—as best as the pressure on his face would allow— from a smirk into perusing non-expression.
It was the look of a man sobering up.
A hand snapped up, clawed fingers seeking her own, before a metaphysical interaction firmly rejected the attempt.
Yuriko heard a crack, but under adrenaline, she couldn't tell if it came from his digits or her foot collapsing the soil beneath them.
Then came the boom, and she knew that that was her. That it was them—a sound they made together.
Tunnel vision took over, like she was watching the world from the perspective of an earthbound comet. Their surroundings warped. A section of the fence blew open. Browns furrowed. Greens tore themselves from their anchors. Bark detonated. She felt, before she saw the curse mid-way through a baleful cackle. It must have been moving from its own frame of reference—desperately reeling from their path in a fit of self-preservation. But from theirs? Purple coloured their wake. Any slower and it wouldn't have been moving.
Comet Yurikuna cleared the treeline in that single bound, and by the time they hit the nearest satellite, the blur of colour had settled on brick dust, overturned tables and hastily stacked sheets of paper deserted the very instant the school day was over. A classroom.
Yuriko blinked. The vector denoting 'Sukuna's' weight had changed at some point. Shortened. Her hand was still firmly attached to the section of face she'd grabbed, but the section of face was no longer attached to—
"Dismantle."
She whipped around wildly, reverse engineering the direction of the voice. A number slammed into her, but it was ultimately just a larger kitchen utensil. The attack reflected just as easily as his first had. Where they differed however, was in resultant damage.
Wires sparked. Tiles erupted. A crescent shaped patch of sky became visible through the building.
Something integral to its structural was groaning.
Sukuna stared, the skin of 'his' face already healing, 'his' body leaned to the side like he had expected the reprisal, like he wanted to try her anyway.
An experiment?
"What an annoying technique." he glowered, placing fist on his chin. "Brute force won't cut it, huh?"
She lunged. Her palms spread apart, but suddenly, there was an upturned desk between them. She slammed into it, and beyond typical conservation of momentum, there was no further interaction between her power and the desk. A miscalculation.
"Sloppy," he mocked. "Do you even know what you're doing?"
Yuriko flipped the arrow, sticking the table to her palm.
"Is this what passes for a sorcerer in this era?"
She swung; calculations ran along the length of wood. Sukuna stepped out of the way with full economy of movement. She missed. The table thudded out of her influence.
"Try to be a little more subtle." he lectured. An eerie smile adorned ̶ ̷Y̷u̷j̷i̷'̷s̷ Sukuna's features. The tattoos stretched tight on his face. "Like this."
Again. She didn't feel his cursed energy flare until the blade was already flying. It didn't matter—the number contacted her field—it wouldn't hit...Wait. Her mind raced. The attack's trajectory, if she just allowed it to reflect as it was...
They haven't moved yet!
Yuriko willed hard, more on instinct than calculation. She frantically altered its direction, scattering the attack with little finesse. The whiteboard scratched. Spider-web cracks populated panes of glass; a tree fell over with nobody close enough to hear it. A fence link snapped.
"You!" Her eyes widened. "You were aiming for—"
Another slash slammed into her, but she had already altered the math to compensate. Another gash through the ceiling. Moonlight spilled through the gaps. The moment was cast in silver.
Sukuna clapped. Slowly. In cloying approbation. Yuji's face, that kind face, was perverted into sickest mockery of the first smile he had ever raised for her. Her heart was in her ears, pounding incessantly. Rationality gave way to rage as the attack's trajectory was retraced. If she hadn't altered her reflection, if she hadn't deviated from her default parameters... Yuriko would have sashimi'd her friends. And he knew that. Had aimed for it specifically.
A nauseating pressure settled on the classroom.
There was the sound of stationary—it could have been a board pen, it could have been a pencil. Whatever it was was rolling, until it onomatopoeia'd against the floor. A faint clatter, inaudible under regular circumstances. In the silence, it was a gunshot like the signal for a race. In the silence, Suzushina Yuriko evaluated Ryoumen Sukuna with a colder set of eyes. One pair drilled into two.
Contempt.
Contempt.
Contempt irradiated the room on a vanishing half-life. Contempt raked its claws against the walls and howled with such bass, the whole world was shaking. Contempt chiselled hairline fractures into the very foundations of the building. And by the time Yuriko regained voluntary control of her 'contempt', she had lost five minutes' worth of active power.
Sukuna whistled. In appreciation of the show, or of his own strategy, Yuriko couldn't tell.
"Too easy," he goaded.
Yuriko lunged— aggression dancing at the knife's edge of her fingertips; Sukuna proved to be the more experienced performer. Just. One. Touch. But the ancient sorcerer was moving before she had. His shoes tapped a desk when she struck the ground. He waltzed onto the windowsill when she barrelled into the whiteboard.
Taunting all the while.
Swing.
"Ahh, so if it isn't your intended target, your technique—"
Miss.
"You'll run out before, or maybe I'll—"
It was like he could see the sum of their choreography before she even made the next step... and maybe he could.
Swing.
Her palm became an inferno of cursed energy—she sees his eyes shift. Oh!—and he tangoed away to a wall.
Miss.
Perhaps she could be forgiven for not realising that there would be such an obvious element to sorcery battles. It wasn't like Yuriko had actually fought anything that could think since her powers emerged. But it was so damn obvious, a little embarrassment slashed through her frustration. As a sorcerer Yuriko could sense other sorcerers; ergo, other sorcerers could sense her too.
Sukuna had to be reading her energy spikes. Predicting her actions as they lagged behind her the motion of her cursed energy. The ability to sense curses was a machine that was turning Yuriko's inputs (read: potential blasts of concussive force) into Sukuna's outputs (read: "too slow, brat").
With that in mind....
"What's the matter? Too scared to take a hit from a little girl? I don't have a kilogram of muscle on me," she sneered. "Were you the King of Curses or the King of Chickens?"
"The fuck is a kilogram?"
She kicked a table. Tensile strength ignited in her mind, and she split it down the middle. A string of calculations manifested as 'flank him.' Left, right. His routes cut off by lethal velocity. The only path was forward. A one-way road to her.
Sukuna splayed his fingers and her projectiles exploded.
But she had closed the distance. She gestured with her right—the same gesture she used when controlling the wind—she saw him see her do it. The flooring creaked. Her fingers became turgid with power. Yuriko swung.
Sukuna leaned and her palm went wide. Missed. This she had expected. Accounted for. The real attack was from her left fist. No amplification beyond what naturally occurred when she bid her cursed energy to flow. No real complexity to it. Just a punch shielded by her ambient technique.
Instinctively, the King of Curses lifted his forearm. For anyone else, aside from maybe Satoru, the gesture would have turned the clumsy haymaker into glancing blow. For her? Force. Counterforce. Her fist slammed into Sukuna like a hammer propelled by high-octane spite. She heard his ulna crack.
Sukuna staggered. The bruise formed and healed in real-time. He would have recovered, if she had let him. If she had hesitated. But Yuriko was already calculating. Her right palm, which was overflowing with energy seized the air around them. Sukuna smiled, as the room pulsed. A gamely sort of smile. The kind that said, "well played," when you captured a developed piece. It was a good sportsman's acknowledgement of a riposte. And Yuriko, no matter how revolted, no matter how repugnant she found the thing that wasn't Yuji, was unable to fight the urge to return it. Teeth bared; eyes wide, she smiled right back at him.
A column of force slammed into the King of Cutlery, and Sukuna flew. Back-first through the classroom. Back-first through a wall which broke into the cafeteria until ̷Y̷u̷j̷i̷'̷s̷ his back slammed into the divider that separated the gymnasium from the rest of the school.