Hardly had the door clicked shut softly when Shoko stormed toward me like a wild fury. Her hands landed beside me on the bed – no, almost slammed down – and she glared at me from her doe-brown eyes. A whiff of cigarette smoke clinging to her clothes drifted to my nose.
"What's going on between you two, Toru?!" she growled threateningly, using for the first time in a long while the nickname she had given me, "you're wiping blood off her leg. She hugs you – and you? You hug back?! Are you sure it wasn't you who had the fever, instead of Mayu?"
Inwardly, I grinned sheepishly. Too bad she knew me way too well.
"Maybe I'm sick. Really sick. Not physically, but... you know. Heart flu. Is that a thing?"
There it was – the traitorous eyebrow. Paired with that dissecting look she had already hinted at earlier. And under the cold white beam of light shining down, it felt threatening. Her scalpel of intuition twirled in her fingertips. And I hated it – especially when she operated on me.
"Heart flu, huh? That's easily treated!"
"Curable?"
She shrugged her left shoulder. The left one! Men knew exactly what that meant.
"Conditionally," the word slid conspiratorially from her lips.
Pardon! Hopefully she wouldn't make me the enemy. Or worse – become an ally of Mayu. Speaking of.
"How did you pull that off?"
A tiny question mark flickered across her stern gaze before she furrowed her brow. Deep wrinkles – had she just realized what I was hinting at?
"Not me. And I hope you can give me some answers to that. As soon as you were out of Sukuna's reach with your finger, Mayu Ryomen's values and health condition quickly stabilized again. Just as fast as it came – it went. And believe me, it wasn't the meds. Otherwise, she'd still be lying here."
…
Once again, the threads of my web of questions spun out toward me. Was that an attack? Against Mayu? Or maybe something from her herself — something even she couldn't name?
I glanced stealthily into Shoko's eyes, framed by her violet eyeshadow. Purple.
Mayu Ryomen — Ryomen Sukuna.
Shoko's gaze darkened, and a cold shiver ran down my spine. She expected my answer, and I silently refused with a shake of my head.
With momentum, she pushed herself off the examination table, but not without throwing me a look that said 'I'm watching you' before settling onto her stool and crossing her arms.
"Do you think she'll become like him?" Shoko cut the silence coldly.
I looked at her in horror.
Mayu? This little, loving chaos? Like Sukuna?
Immediately, the door opened again and Mayu reentered smiling. Purposefully, she sat down next to me on the table, and I observed her subtly from the corner of my eye.
"Never!" I said to Shoko — maybe a little too loudly.
Even with a vivid imagination, I couldn't conceive it.
Maybe out of fear it might come true, or because I simply didn't want it? Even if it did, it would be my challenge to bring her back on the right path.
Maybe that was crazy. Maybe it was me. But hey — heart flu, after all. Or simply — that wasn't the Mayu I was beginning to know.
"Say, Mayu," Shoko started in her questioning tone, "you picked up that finger from the curse spirit."
I sensed something bad. Ominous.
"… Oh, right!" she suddenly remembered, "No idea what got into me, but I felt it was important to take it with me."
She shook herself disgustedly, as well as her hands.
"But," she continued without letting the word escape her, "that was really strange."
Shoko and I shared the same interested expression.
"When that finger appeared — whoever it belonged to, because the curse spirit had a completely different skin color — suddenly countless curse spirits appeared around me. Out of nowhere! So many at once. I couldn't explain it, but I knew one thing. They were ravenous for that finger, like pigeons thrown a piece of bread."
Sukuna's power.
But did I hear that she didn't actually know who Sukuna was?
"That's typical for that finger," Shoko sighed, one finger resting on her chin, "a special-grade cursed object. It attracts other curse spirits who want to absorb it. … But what happened next? Didn't they attack you?"
Mayu frowned and seemed to think deeply.
"N-no," she stammered with effort, subtly shocked, "it was more like a mixture of wanting to approach me, but not too close. As if they were afraid of me."
So she noticed it too?! That made it clear to me that this couldn't just be an illusion.
"What?! Are you sure you didn't imagine it?"
Now Mayu and I shook our heads in sync.
"I noticed it too," I joined in, "as soon as they got close, they fled or retreated again."
"Mayu," Shoko began urgently, inhaling tensely, "… Do you know who … Sukuna is?"