Dying was easy. It was the waking up part that proved to be a real headache.
When Kaito Hibiki first opened his eyes to the world, everything was entirely too bright, too loud, and incredibly confusing. He couldn't speak, he couldn't walk, and his motor skills were nonexistent. For a soul that vividly remembered already being a person, being trapped in the body of an infant was nothing short of a nightmare.
He knew he had died. That much was certain. The memory of his past life was like a dream slipping away right after waking up—he couldn't remember his old name, his family, or how he passed away, but he retained the feeling of having lived. He understood concepts like electricity, cars, and the fact that he definitely shouldn't be drooling this much.
But as the years passed, the ghost of his past life faded into the background, becoming a quiet hum in the back of his mind. He accepted his new reality. He was Kaito Hibiki.
However, by the time he was four years old, Kaito realized his new reality was profoundly weird.
It started with the bugs. That's what he called them at first. Grotesque, multi-eyed, slimy things that crawled along the ceilings of dark rooms or clung to the shoulders of exhausted-looking people on the street. At first, Kaito thought everyone could see them. He pointed one out to his mother at the grocery store—a floating blob with too many teeth hovering over the fruit section. His mother had just smiled, patted his head, and called him imaginative.
That was Kaito's first lesson: the world was infested with invisible monsters, and he was the only one who could see them.
He didn't know what they were. He didn't know the word "Curse." He just knew they were ugly, and they gave him a deeply uncomfortable feeling in his chest.
That same uncomfortable feeling was also the source of his second major discovery.
It happened when Kaito was six. He was playing by himself in a small park near his house as the sun began to set. A shadow had detached itself from the playground equipment—a low-level curse that looked like a starved dog made of black sludge. It wasn't particularly strong, but to a six-year-old, it was terrifying. It slithered toward him, gnashing a jaw full of mismatched teeth.
Kaito backed away, his heart hammering against his ribs. A strange, heavy knot of heat suddenly flared deep in his stomach. It felt like holding his breath until his lungs burned. The monster lunged.
Kaito squeezed his bright green eyes shut, threw his hands up, and screamed.
"Go away!"
He expected to be bitten. Instead, he heard a sound like a thunderclap right next to his ears.
A distortion in the air—a crude, unstable ring of bluish-black energy—snapped into existence inches from his mouth. It caught his scream, magnified it by a thousand, and fired it forward as a solid shockwave. The force of the sound hit the sludge-dog like a speeding truck, splattering it into a fine purple mist that evaporated instantly.
Kaito fell backward onto the grass, gasping for air, his throat raw and his ears ringing violently. He stared at the empty space where the monster had been. Then, he looked down at his small, trembling hands.
The blurry memories of his past life supplied him with a concept: Superpowers. A lopsided, excited smile slowly spread across his face. He wasn't just a reincarnated kid who could see ugly ghosts. He was armed.
Over the next four years, Kaito made it his personal mission to figure out what the hell was inside him. He learned that the energy in his gut—the heavy, burning sensation—responded to his emotions, but mostly to his willpower. He learned that if he just yelled, the power was wild and destructive. He needed to shape it.
He started visualizing the energy. In his mind, he pictured speakers. Amplifiers. Disks that could catch the noise and focus it.
By the time Kaito was ten years old, he had cultivated a very specific attitude. He knew he was different, he knew he was strong, and it gave him a natural, effortless confidence.
He sat cross-legged on the edge of an abandoned concrete building, swinging his legs over the drop. The evening breeze ruffled his short, messy brown hair, sending a few spiky strands falling over his forehead. His bright green eyes, sharp and alert, scanned the empty lot below. He was dressed for comfort and mobility—a crisp white t-shirt with a bold black vertical stripe down the center, layered over a black, long-sleeved turtleneck. His baggy, green cargo pants were scuffed at the knees, the large side pockets stuffed with a few loose coins and pebbles.
He leaned back, resting his hands on the rough concrete, that familiar, confident smirk playing on his lips.
"Alright," Kaito muttered to himself. "Let's try for a solid shape today. No blowing up my own eardrums."
He took a deep breath, reaching down into that knot of energy. He extended his right hand, palm open, keeping his mind entirely focused on the concept of containment and resonance.
The air above his hand began to warp and shimmer. Pale, bluish-black energy rippled into existence. Usually, it just looked like a messy, vibrating blob. But today, Kaito forced the energy to flatten. To spin.
Slowly, the energy coalesced into a solid, hovering disk. It looked almost mechanical—a sleek, dark circle with glowing blue rings along its edge, like a futuristic speaker. It hovered an inch above his palm, emitting a low, steady thrum that made the bones in his arm vibrate.
Kaito's green eyes widened in triumph. "Yes! Finally!"
He had done it. Juso Enban Kyōmei—The Resonance of Cursed Disks. Of course, he didn't know the proper name for his Innate Technique. To him, it was just 'the noise thing'.
"Okay, let's test the output," Kaito whispered, a mischievous glint in his eye.
He pointed his palm, and the hovering disk, toward a stack of rusted metal pipes a few yards away. He didn't scream this time. He just sent a mental command to the disk to release a concentrated pulse of sound.
The disk shrieked—a piercing, distorted metallic screech. A ripple of weaponized sound blasted forward, slamming into the pipes. The rusted metal didn't just dent; it warped violently, groaning under the sheer acoustic pressure before several pipes snapped in half, sent flying into the dirt.
But the recoil was immediate. The beautiful, futuristic disk instantly fractured like cheap glass, exploding into a shower of harmless blue sparks that faded into the air.
Kaito let out a sharp hiss, clutching his hand. A dull ache throbbed behind his eyes, the cost of draining his mysterious energy too fast.
"Still unstable," he grumbled, shaking out his wrist. "And the durability sucks. But the power... yeah, the power is definitely there."
He laid back on the concrete roof, staring up at the darkening sky. The stars were beginning to peek through the city smog.
Sometimes, Kaito wondered why he was here. The foggy memories of his past life offered no answers. He didn't know what universe he was in, or if there were other people who could do what he did. For all he knew, he was the only person in the world fighting invisible monsters with floating speakers.
But as he laid there, feeling the residual hum of energy in his veins, he realized he wasn't scared of the unknown anymore. He had a second chance at life, a cool outfit, and a superpower that was getting stronger every single day.
Kaito's trademark lopsided smile returned. He closed his eyes, listening to the distant sounds of the city, imagining the day he could materialize a dozen of those disks at once.
"Whatever is out there," Kaito told the empty sky, "they better be ready for a lot of noise."
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Four years later, at the age of fourteen, Kaito Hibiki had established three fundamental rules for his life.
Rule number one: Never buy the egg salad sandwiches from the convenience store on a Tuesday.
Rule number two: Cargo pants were the superior form of clothing, no matter what the fashion magazines said. If a pair of pants couldn't hold his phone, his wallet, three packs of gum, and a handful of rocks, they were useless.
Rule number three: If an invisible, multi-eyed monster interrupted his afternoon nap, it was going to get obliterated.
Kaito sighed, opening one bright green eye. He was lying on his back across the rusted roof of an abandoned train car at the edge of the city. He wore his usual attire—a white t-shirt with a bold black stripe, a black turtleneck underneath, and his trusty baggy green pants. His brown hair was, as always, an untamable, spiky mess.
He had been enjoying a perfectly good nap, right up until the air started smelling like a mixture of rotten eggs and wet copper.
"I know you're there," Kaito said, his voice flat, not even bothering to sit up. "You're breathing really loud. It's embarrassing, honestly."
A massive shadow crept over the train car. Kaito finally sat up, resting his elbows on his knees, and looked at the creature with mild annoyance.
It was easily the size of a minivan. It looked like a bloated, purple tick with six spindly, double-jointed legs and a face that was just one giant, vertical mouth full of jagged teeth. A normal fourteen-year-old would have been paralyzed by fear. A normal fourteen-year-old would be screaming for their mother.
Kaito just rubbed his temples.
"Look, man," Kaito started, pointing a finger at the giant tick. "I've had a really long day. Math class was a disaster, my favorite drink was sold out at the vending machine, and now I have to look at... whatever you are. Can we just not do this today?"
The creature roared, a disgusting, guttural sound that sprayed acidic saliva across the metal roof. It lunged forward, all six legs clicking rapidly against the rusted iron.
Kaito's trademark lopsided smile slid onto his face. The cocky, confident smirk of someone who knew exactly how a fight was going to end before it even began.
"Guess not. Have it your way."
He didn't even stand up. He just snapped his fingers.
The heavy, burning knot of Cursed Energy in his chest—which he had spent the last four years painstakingly learning to control—surged outward. The air around him distorted violently.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Three sleek, metallic black disks materialized in a triangle formation around him. The glowing blue rings on their edges pulsed in perfect synchronization. They didn't shatter. They didn't flicker. They hovered with absolute stability, humming with a low, deadly vibration that made the dust on the train car levitate.
At ten years old, making one disk had given him a migraine. At fourteen, three was his comfortable limit.
"You're too loud," Kaito told the lunging monster. "Let's turn the volume down."
He pointed two fingers at the beast. The three disks instantly shifted, angling themselves to face the giant tick.
Resonance: Stereo Crush.
The disks didn't fire a single blast. Instead, they emitted a continuous, high-frequency sound wave that hit the creature from three different angles simultaneously. The intersecting sound waves created a pocket of extreme acoustic pressure right in the center of the monster's mass.
The curse froze mid-air. Its screech was completely drowned out by the deafening, mechanical hum of Kaito's technique.
For two seconds, the monster vibrated violently, its gross purple skin rippling like water. Then, the acoustic pressure simply tore it apart from the inside out. The creature imploded with a sickening crunch, bursting into a cloud of purple dust that was immediately blown away by the shockwave of the sound.
The three disks spun down, cooling off, before dissolving back into thin air.
Kaito let out a long breath, stretching his arms over his head. "Messy. I need to work on focusing the blast radius. If I keep denting these train cars, the city is going to start investigating."
He reached into one of his many oversized pockets, pulled out a piece of watermelon-flavored gum, and popped it into his mouth. He felt good. The energy inside him felt less like a wild fire and more like a well-oiled machine. The lingering memories of his past life were almost completely silent now, replaced entirely by the thrill of what he could do in the present.
He didn't know what those monsters were. He didn't know where they came from. But as long as they kept showing up, he'd keep practicing his target shooting.
Kaito stood up, dusted off his cargo pants, and hopped down from the train car, whistling a tune as he walked away from the scrapyard.
He was completely unaware that three hundred yards away, peering through a pair of high-powered binoculars from the window of a parked black sedan, a man in a business suit was frantically writing on a clipboard.
The man was sweating profusely, his hands shaking as he adjusted his earpiece.
"T-Tokyo branch?" the man whispered into the radio, his eyes wide. "This is Window Unit 4. I... I have a visual on an unregistered anomaly in Sector 12."
"Report, Unit 4," a stern voice crackled over the radio. "Is it an unregistered Curse?"
"No, sir," the man gulped, looking at the crater Kaito had left on the roof of the train car. "It's a kid. A middle schooler. He just exorcised a Grade 3 Curse without breaking a sweat... and he did it with sound. I've never seen a Cursed Technique like it. It's... it's incredibly destructive."
There was a long pause on the other end of the radio.
"Understood, Unit 4. Continue observation from a safe distance. Do not engage. I will forward the report to the higher-ups."
The man in the suit lowered his binoculars, watching the teenage boy in the baggy green pants casually stroll down the street, blowing a bubble with his gum.
Kaito Hibiki thought he was just a weird kid fighting ugly bugs in secret.
He had no idea he had just officially pinged the radar of Jujutsu society. And in this world, once they noticed you, they never looked away.
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