The wheels on the bus went around and round, or so it goes, and a boy and girl, both in school uniforms were sitting in silence. The girl scrutinised an empty can of coffee but was also stealing glances at the boy's expressions. Whatever she saw caused the can to instantly compress in her hands.
"Hey," she finally said, spinning the now-disc on a finger. "Yuji."
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry about the table."
It was rash in hindsight, and she felt stupid for allowing herself to be so easily baited. Why had he been so unbothered that she'd tried to kill him? Was that just something he was used to?
Gojo Satoru had to be the most annoying man she had met in her life, but his presence—the way he carried himself—was undeniable. Geto wasn't being hyperbolic. It seemed like his 'friend' could in fact 'see the world,' and the way his eyes picked her apart, along with his choice in diction... She wondered what he'd seen when he looked at her. Did he see where the world ended and she began? Did he see her as a jigsaw piece that fit, but didn't quite complete the image from the rest of the set? Neither was a question that could be asked without biasing the results.
The Tiger of West Junior High —an odd nickname for Yuji, he was more of a golden retriever—just laughed and she remembered she'd started a conversation. It'd been easier lately.
"It's all good, Yurikon. You don't have to keep apologising."
There was no miracle that made objects spontaneously collide, no miracle behind sunsets, or weather. Just cold, hard, mathematics. All she had to do now was follow the logic. When the world became to her a series a numbers and equations, it became both a more and a less complicated place. People, too, became easier to read.
Yuriko was already good at picking out lies out of necessity, but now, when she spent enough time with a person? There was a formula to a lie. She could deconstruct its sound waves, when spoken, pick out the slightest tremor in a voice, lag spikes that belie hesitance, the slight uptick of infrared pinging off a flushed face, et cetera.
Itadori Yuji had just lied. She didn't need any of her extra senses to pick that up, but it certainly helped to be able to confirm that. Her heart sunk a little as she stared wordlessly at his face.
"Woah, you're too good at that," he grumbled. "Fine, yes. I'm upset about the table. But also, not really? I get it. Things got a little heated. I'm not blaming you for what happened. It's just— there were a lot of memories tied to it, you know? With me and Gramps. The new one just doesn't feel the same. Is that weird?"
Yuriko thought of the dining table back at her father's house. Of the house in general. Everything that bore a connection with a 'good memory,' had fit inside her backpack. She considered how she would feel if any of them got damaged beyond repair?
The bus drove past the sprawling ruins of a supermarket.
"I think I get it."
"That's much better than an apology," he said, then his mood lifted as the usual easy smile spawned on his face. "Enough of that! You get to learn how to use magic now! Got your own Dumbledore, and everything. Or is he more a Kakashi...?"
"I... certainly hope he's not like either of them—"
Yuji gasped.
"You're right, he's probably worse."
***
"Why're we even here today?" Sasaki asked, as she twirled spaghetti on her fork.
And it was a valid question. Ten people had died under 'inexplicable' circumstances over the weekend and even more had been injured. Buildings had collapsed, and now road work was being done on roads way ahead of schedule. Road work ahead? No, it certainly does not. According to Gojo the curse he'd fought was the culprit, but the public general public had no way of knowing the man had popped the perpetrator; it certainly took a lot either a healthy amount of consideration, or a complete lack of it for a parent to send their widdles baby to school the next day.
"A lot of the destruction happened near my place," Iguchi said. "They figured it'd be safer to send me in than not. Picking me up straight after, so I can't even go to Karaoke today."
Then he shot Yuriko a glance through the corner of his vision. Sasaki shared a conspiratory grin, as the light caught her glasses.
"Say, Miss Psychic. We've booked for three, and—"
"No."
"Bummer," Sasaki said, but the smile on her face only grew wider. "See you at seven, then."
Yuriko had learned by now that she needed to school her expressions even more around this gang than around strangers and would be mass-murderers. If she scowled any more than they usually made her, her face would cramp up or they'd just use it as fuel to tease her. It... stopped feeling so bad after December.
"Tch."
Iguchi laughed.
"You asked first, but you didn't even tell us why you're here, Sasaki."
A faraway look hit her face as she spoke. "Mum said that back in her day she had to walk five hours uphill to school... both ways."
"Hey, Yuriko, why did your parents—"
A swift elbow from Sasaki, followed by a shin-kick from Yuji. A truly deadly combo. The words died in his mouth like a serial on Netflix deserving a second season.
"Oh, shoot, sorry I wasn't thinking," Iguchi floundered.
Clearly, but she didn't say that. In fact, her words came out with less venom the longer she spent with them. Maybe it was the frequent anime nights at Yuji's at Sasaki's insistence that she was an uncultured swine; maybe it was the trips to the batting cages where they all sat aside and watched Yuji shatter records, and public property; maybe it was simply moments like these, where she sat down at a table, and for the first time in years she wasn't eating alone, but Yuriko felt her fangs soften at the edges. So, while she could have had a dozen other responses—only about twenty percent of which necessitated violence—she chose to respond with sincerity.
"When the fuck do you think, then?" Shit. She groaned emphatically. "So—hmm." Odd, it felt like there was something stuck in her throat. "Soooor." Yuriko coughed.
"Sorry?" Yuji said.
"That's the one, yes." For whatever reason, it had been easier to say that on the bus. "I...not now. Just give me time, okay?"
Sasaki nodded. Yuji flashed that sunshine-and-rainbows smile. Iguchi lifted his plate and started shovelling food down his windpipe as fast as physics would allow.
"Shoot!" he choked between mouthfuls. "Time! I was supposed to be studying." The boy shot to his feet, and ran, flinging a hurried "see you later" over his shoulder as he went.
"Studying?"
"We have a test today, some more this week." Sasaki clarified.
"Huh??"
"Yeah. Maths, classical literature, and molecular science." She counted on her fingers. "Don't either of you check your school emails?"
"We have those?"
Yuji was beside himself; hands on his head and everything. He looked like a Victorian boy who had just been sentenced to the gallows, wallowing in the indifference of the jury. His humours were imbalanced, et cetera.
"He doesn't have a computer at home, so that means I don't have one either. Oh well, they're just tests."
"You don't understand, Yuriko!" Yuji was almost crying "I'm finished. Gramps said if I get another bad grade, he's coming to my funeral."
Yuriko blinked. "Then...just get a good grade?"
Sasaki and Yuji looked shared a look, then like they rehearsed it, redirected that look back at the number one student in all of Sendai.
"Geniuses." Sasaki shook her head. "The rest of us need to study."
"I'm not smart like you!" He sputtered.
"Smart like me? What does that even mean? You're smart, Yuji." Her brow furrowed. "I'm not exactly a genius either, and I do study. Not sure where you got the impression that I don't."
"What's the sixty-seventh digit of pi, Yuriko?"
"Are we counting from before, or after the decimal?"
"After."
"Eight," she replied, not missing a beat. "Why?"
"Yeah," Sasaki chuckled. "I guess you are just like us."
"Why're they even making us do these? That's far from 'standard.'"
"Well, you see Suzushina-chan," a new voice added. It was saccharine, but not the way of a fruit, of tropical flavours that played along the tongue. Her voice was sickly sweet, the same way a corpse became while the necrobiome broke it down into simple sugars. "You've raised the standard. From what I've been told, the school saw fit to accelerate everyone else's progress."
She beamed with more lumens than could be measured from a supernova. And the room lit up. The whispered questions were immediate, the elevated volume inevitable. Attention fell toward her like it was its nature to do so; attention fell captive to her Schwartzshield radius.
Her face was symmetry. Her hair swept to one side of her face, like a curtain drawn aside to reveal a stitched scar running horizontally across her forehead. Her smile showed teeth. Yuriko slammed down her noise suppression to drown out the sound of boys practically choking on their own hormones—some of the girls too.
"I'm the new substitute. Redacted Kaori."
"Redacted?"
"Redacted because I'd prefer if you all just called me Kaori. And don't add the '-san', either. It makes me feel older than I actually am."
"Kaori-san," said Yuji, and her eyes landed on him like a bird of prey on a branch. "We've only just met and all, but do I look smart to you?"
The woman in question put a hand to her chin and really searched the aether for an answer.
"From all my years of experience," she said, taking in the potato that was his face. "No. Definitely not."
Sasaki and Yuriko waited for the punchline, and the punchline never came. Kaori continued.
"Now your friend, on the other hand? She's the kind of child a mother would be proud of. I do wish you were more like her."
The silence crawled like ants under her skin. Her cursed energy coiled and hissed like a cat, seconds away from murdering the one holding the spray bottle. Her anger found its outlet through her lips:
"Fuck off—"
"Yuriko! That's a teacher!"
"It's fine." Kaori waved. "Let her cook."
"—He's fine just the way he is." Suzushina Yuriko fixed Yuji with the glare she had created for Kaori. "Smart? Yuji, you're smart. Believe the so-called 'genius' if that's what it takes to get it through your thick skull. If you're failing, but you're actually trying, then it's school that's failing you. I had to learn how I learned before I was considered any type of genius. I brought subpar grades home. I faced the consequences for that, one way or another, and if you can look at me now and say that I'm smart, then the same is true of you. You just need to find what works for you."
Kaori let out a light chuckle as she covered her mouth with a hand. "Oh dear, the data doesn't back that up. Itadori-kun has always placed in the bottom half."
"How do you even know that, first of all, and—"
"Why haven't you fucked off yet?" said a voice that wasn't Yuriko's.
Yuriko and Yuji's attention snapped onto Sasaki. The girl's tone was chemically calm, but the look on her face was acerbic. Yuriko had never heard her curse before.
Kaori put up her hands. A gentle blush dusted across her face, and her smile became a little softer, a little more real. "You've made such wonderful friends, haven't you, Yuji?" She nodded her head at her own question. "I approve."
That heel turn was almost as abrupt as her heels turning. The odd substitute was gone before any of them could process what she'd said.
"Yuji," Yuriko almost whispered as the mood settled. "You're getting into that top half."
"You really have that much faith in me?"
Yuriko looked him dead in the eye, as Sasaki stood up behind her. Her hand landed on the shoulder of her pink-haired friend co-habitant. She was already mentally designing lesson plans as her cursed technique locked his legs in place.
"You survived Hanako. I have faith in your pain tolerance."
The smile on her face could only be described as 'evil.'
***
"Tactile telekinesis?"
"No."
"Kinetic energy redistribution?"
"No."
"Time-mind-sync-warp?"
"The fuck?"
"No?"
"No!"
"Well how do you expect me to help, if you're not gonna tell me what you do?"
Gojo Satoru, much to Yuriko's chagrin was rocking on a wooden stool in the living room. She took the couch, and she was a territorial beast.
"I thought this—" Yuriko waved her hand—the one that wasn't holding the thing Gojo had called a cursed corpse— in front of the television where an animated movie was playing— "was you helping?"
"According to all known laws of aviation, blah, blah, blah. Haha, bee free. Buzz. Buzz."
"That's for your cursed energy control. You already worked out how it's linked to your emotions, right?"
She nodded.
"Well, I can tell you what you're doing wrong if I can actually get you to feel something."
Yuriko dropped the doll. "Are you implying that I don't do that already?"
This wasn't the first time they'd done this exercise before, and typically, the so-called cursed corpse meant that a sorcerer could train their energy control without supervision. The process was simple in principle. Watch a movie; feel shit. Then the flowchart followed. You either controlled your emotions, and thus your cursed energy, or the damn thing sucker-punched you between the eyes. Pain could be an excellent teacher, at least, that was the justification.
The reason it didn't work for Yuriko? The very first time a punch had been thrown her way, she had nearly shorn the arms right off the stuffed creature. Immediately thereafter, the cursed corpse had found itself with a size M shoe lodged directly where its sternum would be.
They apparently possessed no sentience at all, but now whenever Yuriko fucked up with her energy control, it just meekly started clapping. Not nearly as effective.
"Oh, no, you definitely feel. We established that in our first meeting."
Yuriko rolled her eyes.
"Explain."
"It's just," he started. Then the fully functioning, honest-to-science adult fucking pouted and pointed a finger at her. "What kind of psychopath laughs at 'Graveyard of the Fireflies'?"
"You did."
"Bah! This isn't about me. How is this dumb movie eliciting a stronger reaction from you?"
"It's because it's dumb! Bees don't even—"
A polite sort of golf clap interrupted her. Yuriko glared at the floor, and the cursed corpse respectfully set its hands aside.
"Too easy," snickered the white-haired gremlin.
"This clearly isn't working for me."
"No kidding. But you'll never be to manage your cursed energy properly if you can't get your widdle feelings under control."
"Har-har."
Oh. A thought just occurred to her. Vector Manipulation had been able to influence Accelerator's hormones, and hormones had a lot to do with the upkeep of and genesis of emotions. She wondered what would happen if she just—
"No." Gojo Satoru flicked her in the forehead. Both he, and his chair reappearing in front of her in the same instance.
"Ow." She rubbed her head, and her passive shield came up. "What did I do?"
"I can literally see enough to guess what you're trying to do."
It was her turn to pout.
"I wasn't gonna."
"Uh huh."
Moving on. "Isn't there some other way to fix my issue?"
He rode the change in topic. "Using too much? I don't know what to tell you, just use less."
"I've been trying—wait, 'less...'" Yuriko's mouth hung open. It wasn't like she hadn't tried, but hearing the word 'less' ignited a spark of inspiration. "That's it!"
"It is?"
"Yeah!"
In a handful of her experiments, Yuriko had tried directly controlling her cursed energy with the One-Way Road directly. Of course she had tried. Unlike Accelerator, her power was carried by an 'energy' which should have been easily beholden to its vectors rather than a field, which was a scalar quantity. From what she remembered of Toaru, there were at least two espers who would have been able to—in theory—defeat Accelerator due to their ability to control his AIM dispersion field—something he lacked without his wings. In theory. Always 'if' and 'when,' but never 'is.' Kihara Amata, who had developed Accelerator even confirmed this.
Naturally, Yuriko had tried to control the vectors of her own cursed energy, and thus her cursed technique. She was excited at the prospect of having an almost-advantage that Accelerator did not: meta-manipulation of her vector manipulation.
It was a failure on a few accounts.
When it came to her passive Reflection she had yet to encounter any phenomenon so esoteric that 'simple' mathematics couldn't swat it aside. She hadn't needed to dive into any particularly complex, or imaginary number sets just yet. Not even the raw cursed energy of those annoying 'spirits.'
But actively making cursed energy move exactly the way she wanted? Hell no. It was a bullshit, temperamental and non-Euclidean thing. Just her being frustrated about that was enough of a deviation in the energy's numbers that it rendered her calculations redundant.
Even when they did keep up, with the bizarre ways in which it moved, she'd be expending more effort than it was worth to keep it flowing efficiently. After all, it took cursed energy to make her cursed energy move in the first place. Therefore, she needed efficient cursed energy control to thus use her cursed technique efficiently on her cursed energy.
A fucking feedback loop. If she was ungood to begin with, she'd be doubleplus ungood for trying her little lifehack.
She did get some useful data about cursed energy, and could now finally define what one 'Megumi,' felt like mathematically. That was a significant start, and even before she was able to define its direction to a tee, keeping that baseline in mind would in theory allow her to regulate her output better. Like an axiom that gave her brain something concrete to work with.
She wondered if the first person to define what the Newton was felt the pride that was bubbling inside her. Just use less. A worthy goal indeed. An apple called respect fell begrudgingly from her respect-tree and landed squarely on Gojo Satoru's head. Quick, find a reason to hate—
"Hey, wait a minute, I never gave you permission to call me Yuriko."
"Well, Suzushina-chan, you're not officially one of my students, so I'd also rather you didn't call me Gojo," he spat the name out like it was battery acid. There was a degree of genuine distaste in his tone that she had never heard him reveal before.
"What's got you so worked up?" she asked. No, really. She needed to take notes.
"Adult stuff, Suzushina-chan."
"Okay." She sighed. "Yuriko it is."
Gojo Satoru turned that frown upside-down, but it was still a little flatter than usual.
"Right," he said rising to his to irritating height. Shrink, she willed. "I've got to go now, keep practicing."
He popped out of existence. Yuriko smiled. He popped back into existence, and it was gone.
"Before I forget, catch."
Her reflexes saved the rectangular the grown man had elected to hurl almost full force at a child. Yuriko created a buffer zone that spared the mobile phone? from death-by-Third Law. She turned it over in her hand and unlocked it easily.
"What, is this so you can track me down again?"
"Yeah, if I need to." he said, and it somehow didn't sound like an admission of fault. His tone was bereft of its usual humour. "Never know what could happen... Go have fun with your friends."
"They're not—"
"Yuriko. I can tell you've been lonely for a while, plus you've got that whole tsundere thing going, but—" He gave her a look as best he could through the blindfold. "You're friends," he said. "Accept that now, rather than later."
***
6:35PM: Somewhere arbitrarily between Itadori Yuji's house, and the Karaoke Bar.
"Uhm, Mimiko," said her bleach-blonde twin. "I've been thinking."
"Huh, you're chickening out? I thought you were supposed to be the daring one?"
Mimiko, who had been walking with her sister must have realised the space next to her was suddenly empty. She turned around to find Nanako clutching her arm with a look on her face that spoke to either, fear, apprehension or guilt. Two of the three emotions were concerning when they wore Nanako's face, but the second? That was only natural. After all, she felt it too.
Five minutes. They had to last five minutes against the monster who had waved her hand and sent Shinjuku atremble.
She hadn't fully believed Suguru when he had said that Suzushina Yuriko belonged to his own echelon of sorcerer, but there was no doubting the evidence of her eyes. She would talk her sister through whatever her guilt was later, but she needed to address the fear now—if only to free herself from it as well.
"Nanako..." she started. "I don't exactly trust this 'Kenjaku,' either. But she did seem to have a better understanding of Suzushina's technique, and if she's right? Well," Mimiko smiled, the emotions didn't match. "We're the perfect counter for it. We just need to wear her down, and we can get what we want."
Mimiko locked elbows with her sister and began to gently pull her forward.
"Don't worry so much, little sis," Mimiko said. "Dad's coming home."
That jolted Nanako back to reality.
"What? No." she shook her head as she was led along. "That isn't what I meant."
"Hm?"
"It's, ughh— that pink idiot... And that super saver..." Nanako trailed off.
"Yeah?
"Mimiko...do you know what a supply chain is?"
It was the black-haired twin's turn to stop.
"Huh??"