Authors Note: Had to go back and do a small retcon in chapter 23. Made the mistake of forgetting that gods are infertile, so I changed that particular paragraph to being that humans were made in their image so over countless millennia it isnt too far fetched for slight visual similarities to be present. This also pushes the idea that all the Gods and Goddesses choose to adopt a human form in the lower realm because of this. No need to think too hard on it. Binding vow type shi.
Also istg spelling mistakes are gonna be the death of me. Autocorrect is slacking man, an actual fraud
-------------------------
The carnivorous plant's maw had been inches from closing over the elf when its entire body was slammed downward into the cobblestone street.
The impact cratered the street, cracking with spider like webs outwards as the monster's stem buckled and its tendrils thrashed upwards from the sudden force. Its body was driven flat against the ground with enough pressure to split the stone beneath it.
Yuji stood on top of the creature's head, one foot pressing it into the earth, his hands in his pockets.
"You aren't a monster from the festival, are you?"
The monster's body thrashed beneath his foot, its tendrils whipped upward from the broken street, coiling around Yuji's legs to throw him off, but he didn't budge.
His foot stayed in place as the tendrils wrapping around his body tried all it could to move the man away from its head.
"Yuji?!" Tiona's eyes went wide from behind the barrier of tendrils that had been keeping her away from Lefiya, which now gave way as they all tried to get rid of Yuji instead.
He didn't respond. Instead, he removed one hand from his pocket.
A thin red line ran down from his palm.
His own blood began moving with a life of its own. It flowed against gravity, branching and splitting as it extended outward in thin tendrils as precise as wires and as sharp as blades.
His blood pierced through the creature's flesh at multiple points along its body, each tendril driving deep into the pale green skin that had repelled the Amazon's punch and kicks.
The monster let out a screech that sounded like a broken bell as his blood burrowed deep into it, anchoring its body to the street from the inside out. It was completely immobilized.
"Stay back for a moment." Yuji said, his voice calm and neutral.
Tiona and Tione held their positions, but a look of worry was directed towards Lefiya's body, still slumped on the ground behind Yuji.
Yuji crouched down, his foot still on the monster's head, and pressed his free hand flat against the surface of its body. He closed his eyes and began to search.
Direct contact with a living being allowed him to read what sat at its core. He had spent centuries refining this trait of his, adapting his soul perception after cursed energy was removed from the world. Monsters in this world had magic stones instead of proper souls, but they functioned similarly enough as a foundation.
His blood acted as a guide, threading through the creature's body and mapping its interior from the inside out. The magic stone was still there, buried deep within its chest, but there was something wholly wrong about it.
Where a normal monster's magic stone felt like a self contained core, this one felt hollow. Merely acting as a shell with something else nested inside it.
It wasn't acting of its own will, but was unsteady receiving it from somewhere else.
Yuji pushed deeper, noticing the magic stone having the same composition as the magic stone from the creature he'd killed on Floor 50, although it was smaller.
Whats more was he could sense threads spreading out from it. They weren't physical in nature, and were more akin to thin lines of intent that ran from the stone downward, to beneath what lay under Daedalus Street.
'A puppet? This thing is an extension of something else entirely, reaching deep enough past my range.'
Yuji thought to himself, feeling his perception reaching its limits as the threads descended far below towards the deeper parts of the Dungeon.
Yuji opened his eyes, and the moment he did so, the monster beneath him convulsed violently beneath him.
A pulse rumbled through its body, originating from the magic stone. The threads he had been following grew taut, as though whatever was on the other end had felt him looking for it.
Then, they were quickly severed. Every single connection was cut short, and the magic stone flared with a purplish light as a rapid buildup of pressure inside the monster's body coursed through its being.
Yuji moved in an instant, with a single motion, he pulled his foot off the monster's head and pierced his palm with his finger, drawing blood.
The blood seeped out from his wound and quickly formed a blood red dome around the monster's body, quickly solidifying into a hard shell.
Tiona and Tione were confused at first, before a chill ran through their spines, having come to their own conclusions about his actions.
Not even a second later, it detonated. The explosion was contained within the hard blood shell dome that Yuji had erected around the monster, but the sound that reverberated from within was enough to tell them how powerful the force behind it would have been.
Parts of the bloody shell cracked and started to melt, as purple and black smoke seeped out from the tiny openings. It had let out a corrosive liquid the moment it detonated, and once Yuji broke down the dome, the monster was already dissipating into black smoke. The cobblestone street beneath it melted from the liquid, and there was no trace of the magic stone left behind, except for the hissing sound of the monsters' remains.
'That would have levelled this street.' Yuji thought to himself as he crouched next to Lefiya's body and stretched a hand out to her. A white hue of reversed cursed energy covered her body and began healing her. The wound of her stomach was quickly stitched up as her muscles and flesh regrew. The torn muscle knitted itself back together, and ruptured blood vessels were sealed, with the gash on her forehead closing up.
"I-Is she…" Tiona moved to Yuji's side, crouching down to check on Lefiya as Tione stood behind her.
"She'll be fine." Yuji said, with Lefiya's painful breathing having steadied, her complexion slowly restoring to its previous state.
After a few seconds, Yuji withdrew his hand as the white energy faded.
"She'll need some rest. The wounds are closed and the internal damage is repaired, but her body's been through a lot."
Tiona reached out and grabbed Lefiya's hand, squeezing it. "Lefiya, can you hear me?"
"...Mm." A weak sound escaped the elf's lips. Her eyes cracked open, hazy and unfocused, but with relief as she was no longer bearing the pain from her wounds.
Tione stood over them, arms crossed, but the relief in her expression betrayed how seriously she was trying to make herself seem.
"That thing. What was it? I've never seen or heard of a monster like it before."
"Not a festival monster, that's for certain. It came from below, through the ground." Yuji stood up, looking at the still dissolving crater behind them where the monster had been. "Something sent it up here, and when it noticed me, it destroyed itself."
"From below…" Tione repeated, the tension in her shoulders building as he realized the implications of his words. Babel was meant to act as a lid to keep the monsters of the Dungeon from leaving, and yet here one was.
"Tell Finn what happened. Everything. The monster, how it surfaced, how it self destructed. The magic stone it had was the same as the new species I got rid of back on Floor 50." Yuji said to her, patting off the residual dust from his new clothes.
The twins went still at his words. The connection hadn't occurred to them until that moment, the memory of the caterpillar monsters and the large woman shaped creature.
"You're saying these things are connected?" Tiona asked, looking up at Yuji. The usual brightness in her tone was completely absent.
"I'm saying they're the same thing. Smaller, but the same regardless." He pulled his black hood over his head. "Whatever's making them is deep in the Dungeon, and it's using underground routes to send them to the surface."
Tiona and Tione nodded. They knew this might be a bigger problem than what they initially thought, but their Captain should be able to piece the puzzle together.
The sound of wind being cut through the air echoed above them. A golden blur descended from the rooftops and landed at the edge of the crater, rapier drawn and eyes scanning.
Aiz took in the scene in a single sweep. The crater, the dissolving street, Lefiya lying on the ground with blood covering her body, and Yuji standing with his back to it all. His hood covered his head but she spotted the trail of blood streaking through the cobblestone and back into his hand.
Their eyes met for a moment, and Aiz opened her mouth to speak but Yuji turned away before she could.
"I'll leave the rest to you. Tell the Guild you took care of this one. Or don't, I don't care." He said, walking toward one of the still intact side streets.
Tiona called after him, and he heard Aiz's quiet voice asking her what happened, but Yuji didn't stop walking. His thoughts lay elsewhere, to what lay beneath Daedalus Street and to whatever had noticed him from the other side of the monsters' connection.
---------------------
The evening sky over Orario turned into a deep amber hue by the time Yuji made it back to the boarding house.
He pushed the door open and nodded to Edel, who glanced at the faint traces of dust on his overcoat but said nothing. As long as he wasn't dragging mud in, her was fine with this much.
He climbed the stairs to his room and closed the door behind him, sitting on the edge of the bed as it creaked under his weight.
The room was quiet as the sounds of the city filtered through the window shutters. There was a quiet tension in the air from the chaos that erupted from the Monster Feria festival.
Yuji leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor.
'Puppet monsters. Controlled from far below and with a self destruct fail safe. The underground labyrinth, connecting the surface to the Dungeon.'
Yuji went through the information he gathered throughout the day, letting out a sigh, both mixed with annoyance and tiredness. Even when he just wanted to relax, there was always something happening around him.
Ouranos had told him the Dungeon was changing, but Yuji doubted this was what he meant. Bandits in Daedalus Street were one thing, but monsters being pupeted from the deep floors all the way to the surface was something else entirely.
Running a hand through his hair, he was about to close his eyes when-
He froze.
Something stirred inside him.
Not his own thoughts. Not his own Instincts. It was something deeper, something that lived between his soul and the six remnants fused to it.
The six souls moved.
They didn't trash or rage about. They didn't try to press against their confines the way they sometimes did when provoked, but instead, they contracted. They pulled themselves inward, like animals retreating from something they recognized on a primal level.
Fear.
They were afraid.
Yuji sat perfectly still, every muscle locked at the instinct of the six souls drove into his own for a moment before he suppressed it. This was the first time they had reacted so violently and abruptly.
He quickly stood up and disappeared from the room. The sound of the window shutter cracking open echoed through the building.
In the next moment, Yuji was standing on top of the boarding house's rooftop, the evening wind weaving through his hair as he stared out at the horizon beyond.
His senses expanded outward on reflex, sweeping through the city, past the walls and into the surrounding landscape beyond Orario.
There. On the edge of his range, was something that shouldn't exist in this world.
It was impossibly faint, muted by what he assumed was the suppression all Gods placed their power upon descending. However, underneath that suppression, beneath the sealed Arcanum, was a signature that no amount of divine restriction could fully hide from him.
He knew it. He was all too familiar with it.
He had carried pieces of it inside his body for a short period, but it was something that was forever ingrained into his very being. It was what changed the course of his entire life.
The feeling vanished a moment later, as though whatever it was had tucked itself behind the horizon, but the damage was done. His hands, resting by his side, had clenched into fists without him noticing, but he calmed down. This was an action driven by his brothers, rather than himself.
Yuji Itadori kept silent, his eyes fixed on the distant horizon. A beat of silence later, he turned around and stepped back.
---------------------
On the East Main Street, the last of the festival stalls were still being packed away under the amber sky. The celebration had long since ended, replaced by the murmur of people that recounted the day's events and Guild workers assessing the damage.
Standing behind his sweet potato stall, Takemikazuchi had been in the process of closing up when his hands stopped moving.
The sweet potato he was holding slipped from his fingers and hit the counter with a dull thud, rolling to the side.
His eyes widened for a split moment.
Something that just passed through his awareness, something from so far away and so deeply suppressed that no mortal could have possibly felt it. But he was no mortal, he was a God of War, originating from the Far East, and his senses were attuned to the presence of those from similar origins.
He looked up at the sky above Orario, past the silhouette of Babel, past the walls of Orario and towards the distant edge of the world.
His face was passive, a flicker of worry and curiosity flashing through his eyes.
"Lord Takemikazuchi? Is everything alright?" His assistant and Familia member, a young human girl with short black hair that covered her eyes, looked at him with concern.
He didn't answer, turning away to pick up the dropped sweet potato, his thoughts going back to the brief encounter he had with the pink haired man days prior.
A God from the Far East had descended into the Lower World.
And Takemikazuchi knew exactly which one.
----------------------
Authors Note: Hope you guys liked the chapter! I've been working on my cliffhanger skills recently, I think you guys would really appreciate the techniques I've cooked up