"Emerge from the darkness, what is blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure."
It closed around her trachea, then she was airborne. The girl's body lagged behind her brain; her feet caught between the next step and the last. Her lips still caught in their pseudo-annoyed poise as they readied a snarky response for her cohabitant. Her friend if she was being honest. Her friend who was no longer where he had been standing before.
Suzushina Yuriko was clawing at her throat. Her nails were coming away red as her mind raced to process.
Three seconds ago. There was a tittering along her senses. A ping. A truly pathetic dot of cursed energy compared to herself, Gojo Satoru, or even Geto. Her barrier asserted itself regardless.
Two-point-two-three seconds ago. She heard the shutter of a cell phone camera. It was around then that the sky started to darken. Like an inkwell had been spilled upon the evening.
Point zero two seconds ago. Itadori Yuji vanished. Her panic was immediate, but as she was reacting, a pressure exerted itself on her neck despite the presence of her vector filter.
Yuriko was clawing at a metaphysical thing she could see, but her fingers could not touch. Yuriko's eyes went wide as they searched the ground even as she was pulled further and further away from it. Yuriko's cursed energy detonated with the wrath of a thousand quasars as she found nothing; not even a flash of pink.
Her back broke a support pillar as she tumbled through the new environment. The pressure around her neck disappeared.
She came up in a crouch as her lungs greedily imbibed the air. Yuriko rubbed her raw neck; she could taste blood in the back of her mouth. Assess the situation. All in all, not the worst pain she had ever been in. Not nearly enough to get her to drop her calculations.
Rebar. Girders. Heavy machinery. She recognised this place; knew where she'd been taken. Her teeth started grinding. Whoever attacked her had picked an appropriate place to die.
***
Sitting in a nearby pâtisserie sat a woman with a surgery stitch running along her forehead. She lifted the last crumb of cheesecake to her lips, and bit.
"Why did you send them instead of me?"
"Would you have gone if I had sent you?"
"No. It's still insulting."
Kenjaku shrugged. "I have uses for that body, and like the crematorium with her mother's corpse, you wouldn't have left anything behind."
Jogo sat on the other side of the table. He would have been turning heads if anyone else could see him and his singular eye and dome-volcano head. The curse smiled at what had been said, before his face fell into a puzzled scowl. "Then what use does that body have if those weaklings can defeat it?"
Kenjaku continued to chew. His mouth hung open for a bit. "I don't think they can beat her. I have no faith in them at all. Their techniques will just give her a little trouble is all. Five minutes of trouble are good enough."
"You haven't answered my question. You do that a lot."
A gentle clink accompanied the fall of Kenjaku's fork.
"Mhmm, that was good."
"You're still not—"
"Have I spoken to you before about Frederick Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra?'"
The curse groaned. The sorcerer sitting before him had the propensity to turn everything into a lecture. It was helpful at the start, before he had properly learned the human tongue, but now it was just grating.
Kenjaku chuckled. "Fine, fine. I'll cut it short," he said, but at this point Jogo knew that Kenjaku's abbreviations still amounted to a dissertation. Jogo wasn't holding his breath.
"Man is a rope, tied between beast and Overman—a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end," Kenjaku quoted.
Thump. Their table attracted attention as onlookers searched for but failed to find the source of what sounded like a head hitting a table repeatedly.
"I like to think of sorcerers that way. As that bridge stretching out to an unattainable end. I believe that every sorcerer owes a debt of gratitude to Jujutsu that can only be repaid once they've optimised their own potential. That's why I respect the power of the current Six-Eyes—thorn in my side that he is—and I respect the power of Ryoumen Sukuna. They've taken their gifts to the extremes, and whenever either is given a challenge, they still find ways to somehow improve." Kenjaku nodded his head at his own words. "But as far ahead as they are, those two can only ever be just a further point along that rope."
"Get. To. Your. Point."
"Suzushina Yuriko? She is whatever lies on the other end of that bridge. If I'm right, then that girl has been born with a truly outrageous technique. One that she's only beginning to get a grasp on. One that is impossible for her, or anyone really, to truly master, but master it enough? It would be hard to relegate whatever she becomes to just a mere sorcerer."
Jogo levied the flattest stare imaginable at the human in front of him.
"To answer your question, the potential applications of her ability are endless, but her fundamentals are lacking—that's why she could feasibly lose to weaklings."
"So, she could be stronger than Gojo Satoru and Ryoumen Sukuna if she had the chance to grow?"
"If you want to be reductive about it, yes."
"The future strongest human, huh?" Jogo rubbed his temples. "You could have just said that."
"Oh, but that would be a lie, you see." And Kenjaku smiled with all of Itadori Kaori's teeth. "With the way things are now, the sorcerer with the most potential is Geto Suguru."
***
Two signatures appeared in the building around her; they landed chaotically. Teleportation, then. Like Satoru, but with less finesse.
Where had they taken Yuji? Why target her at all?
It was when she focused on one of them that she realised she recognised it—weirdly recognised both. Not by the weight they held in her mind, but by their sheer insignificance. Mimiko and that twin sister the terrorist spoke of, if she had to guess. There was no meaningful way to distinguish between the pair of them.
Revenge, then? Okay. She hoped that was it. As bloody, cold or ruthless as revenge got, it was always less complicated and troublesome than agenda.
Evaluate.
So far—she felt the blood running down her neck— the girl she had met was the only proven credible threat, with that doll of hers and her fucking vectorless targeting system, but she couldn't rule out the possibility that the other sister could do something similar. This was definitely a calculated plan, and their bad math notwithstanding, she wasn't going to discount the sister as a variable.
Yuriko tapped a nearby brick with her foot, splitting it at the point of contact. BANG!
It was soft, near imperceptible, but she heard another shutter of a camera phone, and suddenly neither target was where they had been when she'd launched the brick. There was the sonorous sound of steel hitting the ground, and the sound of concrete fracturing, but absent from the noise was the sound of bones breaking and blood spraying. Yuriko snarled.
Once again, the thing beyond touch closed around her neck, but she didn't even give it a chance this time. Yuriko's fury burned it away before it could take hold. A minute lost. And that was when she figured out their little game plan.
Hit and run. They never once thought they could beat her in a face-to-face confrontation so they were playing for time—forcing her to actively waste her cursed energy with an attack she couldn't passively block. They'd even taken Yuji hostage, presumably because they must have known she could just bring the building down on top of them. They were counting on her restraint. A bold gambit; she would make them regret it.
Yuriko placed a palm flat on the wall behind her, and numbers came alive in her mind. This wasn't something she had tried before. Controlling a structure so large; so complicated. The earth didn't count—she hadn't been aiming for precision then. She didn't need the building to fly into the sun. She needed it to list just enough that only the girl who could control her own footing remained standing.
She felt the numbers shudder along the last bit of steel before the sky, right down to the very foundations of the would-be building. The effect was cruel in its immediacy. Metal screeched as the environment did its best Tower of Pisa impression and leaned. Not quite like a house of cards, but like a chair that had its hind legs kicked out, everything but Yuriko was swept one way.
Cursed energy spat desperately from above her. She felt more so that she heard a heavy object pin one of the twin sisters to a wall, before she had the chance to flicker away to safety. A broken rib or two, guaranteed. Yuriko smiled. Snap. And that unmistakable sound of camera. It should have been too noise to make anything out in the wake of the cacophony she'd conducted, but that was what Fourier transformations were for. Nothing unnecessary made it through her filter.
"You okay up there, besties?" She didn't shout. Didn't need to, her power carried both her voice and the glee therein toward them. "Don't worry, I'm heading up."
That prompted a reaction. Already she could feel the pressure on her neck, but it wasn't her who wouldn't be getting the chance to breathe.
Yuriko's muscles loaded up with potential as she bent her knees. She wasn't using her technique for this; not beyond shielding herself from opposing forces. The arrogant little parts of her were screaming that she could do this. That she was strong enough to make the jump. That up, up and up was the only way to go. Her cursed energy flared in tandem to her designs, and suddenly it had a direction she could understand. The One-way Road aside, direction was something her brain had been optimised to understand.
In 1946, the General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the amount of force required to accelerate one kilogram of mass at a rate of one metre per second squared. Two years later, they dubbed this unit the 'Newton.'
In 2018, in an abandoned construction site in Sendai. Suzushina Yuriko defined the force of will necessary to accelerate one 'Megumi' of cursed energy at a rate of one metre per second squared in a given direction. And it was a vector.
It seemed that it was easier to control when given a purpose. Your friends. She would die before she let Satoru know she had taken his advice.
Yuriko felt the ground detonate beneath her as her legs straightened. She felt the ceiling give way as physics made exceptions that only applied to her. And in her elation, she failed to notice the shower of black sparks she had left in her wake.
***
"Nanako!"
Mimiko had been lucky to escape the cascade of debris. Though she supposed luck had nothing to do with it when her sister—still prone against the support pillar—had been actively postponing their Darwin awards.
Mimiko shook her head; it didn't stop the ringing. Monster. The fear was back, though it had never quite left.
She had simply found a way to tie its knot tighter and tighter until it was so small that she could hardly feel it. Fear for herself. Fear for her sister. Fear that they wouldn't be able to deliver their end of the bargain and leave the man who had given them their freedom—who had given them everything— with a sword hanging precariously over his head.
Kenjaku had given them the basics of the albino's cursed technique, but he had also given them a psychological profile of the girl. The girl was fiercely protective of anything she viewed as hers; she had dug a damn hole in a park at ungodly hours just to protect a light novel. She had made sure to grab it after a traumatic seemingly first encounter with a Grade One curse. How much more protective would she be of people she cared about?
That's why they had to remove Itadori Yuji from the board, why they couldn't risk a single hair on his head. Using him as a hostage was unthinkable, for reasons Kenjaku had refused to explain to them. They couldn't even drag the other two into the matter, because ultimately there was just no telling how she would react.
And now, seeing her sister crushed momentarily against the scaffolding, it became more apparent to her. Snap. Kenjaku, who had proven to be the strongest sorcerer—apart from Gojo Satoru—they had ever seen had given them a particularly pointy stick and sent them into a lion's den. Stall for time. Laughable. And it wasn't because they were somehow the optimal counter from Suzushina's bullshit. It was because he, too, was afraid.
"You okay up there, besties?" Mimiko heard the voice like a thought in her own head. Her heart dropped to her stomach; Nanako's eyes widened. She had heard it too. "Don't worry, I'm heading up."
"Run!"
"No!" Mimiko shouted with a confidence she did not feel in the slightest. Her fingers fumbled as she threaded the next rope around the doll's neck. "It's only been two minutes! I can still—"
There was barely even enough time for Nanako to raise her phone before the ground under her sister ceased to be. A flash of white shot through the space where she had been standing, before slamming into the roof and sticking there.
White hair that fell like tarantula legs. Red eyes that foresaw a bloody future. The smile they had heard in her voice.
"Run?" said Suzushina Yuriko, as she took in the ruined surroundings. "Run where?"