"If I lose," Gojo said once, seated backwards on a chair in the courtyard, sunglasses in his fingers, not on his face, "then you're next in line."
Yuta blinked. "Next for what?"
Gojo tilted his head, smiling like it wasn't terrifying. "To be the strongest. To be the wall. The one that makes the world say, 'It's okay. He's here.'"
Yuta didn't answer.
He remembered the way the sun caught on Gojo's white hair. The way his voice lost all its playfulness when he spoke again.
"It's not a power-up. It's a burden. You carry everyone else's fear and pretend you're fine. You make the impossible feel routine. And when you lose, the whole house comes down with you."
Gojo smiled sadly.
"And maybe that's why we never stay around for long."
Yuta swallowed. "But I'm not you."
Gojo laughed. Not mockingly. Softly.
"I wasn't me either when I started."
.
.
.
.
.
.
The trees were wrong.
Yuta knew it the moment he stepped beneath their skeletal branches, too tall for fruit trees, too bent for shade, their bark cracked with lines of black crystal and fungus.
Something had grown here once.
Something normal.
But that was long ago.
Now the orchard stood like a graveyard with roots, and the wind moved through the dry leaves like a warning whispered in a dead language.
He stayed near the edge at first.
He hadn't spoken to another living soul in nearly two weeks.
The world hadn't allowed it.
Bandits, militia checkpoints, wandering Infected, he'd learned quickly that kindness was a risk no one could afford.
Even now, he remained still as stone beneath the gnarled canopy, watching the farmhouse half-hidden behind the growth.
The wood was rotted.
The windows broken.
But there was smoke rising from a bent metal chimney.
Pale, thin, real.
Life.
He saw the boy first.
Small.
Too small for his clothes, frayed pants tied at the waist with wire, sleeves rolled past his elbows and stitched with patchwork colors.
His hair was dark and uneven, like it had been cut with a knife, and his shoes were mismatched.
One of them was a boot.
The other was a slipper wrapped in plastic and rope.
He carried a rusted pot and a cracked glass bottle as he moved slowly from the farmhouse to a half-buried pipe near the orchard's edge.
Yuta watched as he crouched, pressed his ear to the metal, then tapped it with the butt of the pot.
Not random.
A signal.
The boy waited.
Then unscrewed a valve with both hands, careful not to spill a drop of the thin condensation that dripped into the pot.
Once done, he wiped the pipe clean with a cloth sewn from old uniforms and walked back inside.
Not once did he look around.
Not once did he act like a child.
Yuta crouched lower.
He wasn't sure how long he stood there, hidden beneath the shade.
Hours, maybe.
The sky dimmed, the color draining from it as the sun slid behind a horizon littered with broken wind turbines.
Eventually, the light in the farmhouse went dark.
And still, Yuta didn't move.
This was the first time he'd seen a place that felt like it had roots.
Not a camp. Not a ruin. A home.
Weathered, wounded, but living.
And he didn't want to scare them. He didn't want to bring his world into theirs.
So, when morning came, he left.
But he returned the next day.
And the next.
Always staying hidden, always observing. The boy came out again, sometimes alone, sometimes with the woman.
Taller than the boy, broad-shouldered and lean with a limp in her right leg that slowed her but didn't stop her.
Her face was lined and sun-worn, and one eye had a jagged scar running through the lid, forcing it mostly shut.
She worked with grim precision, harvesting fungus from the tree trunks, tending to wire snares near the perimeter, inspecting what looked like solar panels made from shattered screens.
She was strong.
Not in the way Gojo was.
Not even in the way Yuta had been.
Her strength was ordinary, and that made it harder to look at.
Because it was still enough.
She'd survived where so many sorcerers wouldn't have.
She'd raised a child in this nightmare.
On the fifth day, the boy saw him.
Yuta hadn't meant to be noticed.
His energy had been too low to fully mask. Maybe he'd moved too fast.
Or maybe the boy had just grown up with danger.
Their eyes met across the orchard.
The boy didn't scream.
He just stared. Tight-jawed. Still.
Then turned and walked back inside without a word.
That night, Yuta didn't sleep.
He waited again in the shadows, unsure whether he should leave or try to speak.
When the moon was highest, he stepped from the trees and left behind half of his scavenged rations, wrapped in clean cloth, no weapons, no messages.
In the morning, they were gone.
Replaced with a small, dried strip of meat.
Rat. Probably.
Wrapped in plastic with a crude charcoal drawing of a sun on the front.
Yuta smiled, despite himself.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was human.
He ate it slowly.
The boy left another offering the next day, two bruised root vegetables and a bottle of cloudy water with charcoal inside.
In return, Yuta left clean cloth strips and a scavenged lighter.
Neither side spoke. Neither side approached.
But the rhythm formed.
On the third night, it rained.
Cold, stinging drops fell through the broken canopy, soaking Yuta's coat.
He'd taken refuge in the shell of a derailed tram car nearby, but it was already rusting through. His reinforcement kept him from shivering, but not from thinking.
The world outside his simple domain was soaked in hunger, disease, and rot.
Even Rika's voice, always so loud inside his soul, was silent now.
Dormant.
Maybe this is what it feels like to die slowly.
...
When morning came, he stood and walked to the edge of the orchard.
Not hiding.
Not yet intruding.
Just waiting.
And this time, when the woman saw him, she didn't send the boy back inside.
She limped forward, stopping halfway between the house and the treeline.
Her hands were bare. Her eyes, one good, one half-shut, held nothing warm.
"You sick?" she asked.
Her voice was like gravel rubbed through linen.
Yuta shook his head.
"You infected?"
"No."
"Got weapons?"
"Not anymore."
She stared at him. Measured. No fear, only calculation.
The kind that came from counting every scrap, every second.
Finally, she turned her back to him.
"Then come help."
He followed.
The work was quiet. Hard. Relentless.
She introduced herself as Ayane.
She didn't ask for his name. Neither did the boy.
Yuta hauled metal debris from the northern edge of the property and stacked it into makeshift barriers.
He reinforced his legs when moving through mud.
Patched a torn segment of roof with tarps and glass.
He didn't use cursed energy overtly, just strength, silence, and sweat.
At night, they gave him a spot on the floor near the small stove.
Kuro didn't speak to him much.
But he watched.
Curious. Cautious.
On the fourth night, while Ayane slept, Kuro slid a beaten children's book toward Yuta under the dim glow of a solar lantern.
The pages were missing chunks.
The drawings were faded. But the title read:
"The Iron Bird and the City That Waited"
Yuta looked at it. Then at Kuro.
"Your favorite?"
Kuro nodded.
Yuta opened to the first page and started reading.
The boy listened in silence.
And when he slept, he leaned slightly against Yuta's arm.
Days bled into one another.
The routine stabilized.
Not normal.
Nothing in Terra was normal.
But stable.
Yuta learned that Ayane had once worked for a logistics company before the war had ripped it apart.
Her limp came from a mine collapse in Rim Billiton.
Her husband, she never spoke of.
The implication hung in the air, heavy and understood.
Kuro, though, he still played.
Rarely. Quietly.
But there was a spark.
He would sometimes draw on pieces of bark with burned coals.
Crude pictures of animals. Of what he imagined cities used to look like.
Once, he drew a robot with wings and showed it to Yuta, smiling shyly.
"That's you," he said.
Yuta blinked.
"Why?"
"Because you showed up from nowhere," Kuro said simply. "And you help."
Yuta looked at the drawing.
It was rough, scribbled, almost silly.
But he kept it.
Later that night, Ayane passed him a cup of steaming water and sat beside him.
"You're not normal," she said without accusation.
"I'm not."
"You're not infected. You're not hungry like us. Not tired like us. But you're not a killer either. Not like the others."
Yuta looked into the cup.
"I was," he said.
She said nothing.
"Back where I came from... I was made to fight. I lost everything trying to protect what I thought was worth it. And I failed. I still don't know if I deserved to wake up again."
"You still think you're dreaming?" she asked.
He didn't answer.
She took the cup back.
"You're not. This place doesn't give dreams. Only waking hours."
Then she stood and went back inside.
That night, Yuta dreamed for the first time in Terra.
Not of Sukuna. Not of Rika.
He dreamed of snow.
Of walking with Maki and Panda through the school courtyard, bundled in coats, laughing.
He dreamed of the taste of warm dango shared beneath paper lanterns.
He dreamed of a time before blood soaked every inch of his skin.
When he woke, it was still dark.
But he was warmer than he remembered.
Kuro had placed his drawing on Yuta's chest while he slept.
"You shouldn't be this strong."
Kuro's voice cut through the silence as he sat on the old tractor frame, legs swinging. His slippered foot tapped metal with soft, rhythmic knocks.
Yuta, crouched in the dirt nearby, looked up from the snare he was repairing. "Why not?"
"You're skinny. And quiet. Strong people are loud," Kuro said. "That's what Mama says."
Yuta smiled faintly. "She might be right."
Kuro stared at him for a second, then added, "You carry metal like it's paper. You lifted the panel off the roof by yourself. That stuff's heavy. Even Mama can't do that."
"I trained a lot," Yuta replied, tightening the cord. "When I was younger than you."
Kuro raised an eyebrow. "Trained to do what?"
Yuta paused. "To fight monsters."
A beat.
"Real ones?"
"Yeah."
"...Like the Infected?"
"No. Worse."
The boy's expression didn't change. But the tapping of his foot stopped.
"What happened to them?" he asked.
Yuta didn't answer right away.
"I thought I killed the worst one," he said eventually, voice distant. "But he was too strong. And I... couldn't go back."
"Go back where?"
Yuta looked at him, then stood.
"Nowhere."
They shared more words in the days that followed.
Ayane kept her usual silence, but even she began offering pieces of herself, short sentences over scavenged meals, comments in passing as she cleaned or sorted dried herbs.
"This place used to be part of a caravan loop," she said one morning, wiping dust from a broken solar cell. "Back when anyone gave a damn about farming."
Yuta leaned against the frame of the porch. "Why stay?"
Ayane didn't look at him. "Because the dead can't follow you here. Just the hungry."
Yuta nodded slowly.
That night, she handed him a worn notebook.
"You can read?"
He opened the cover. Inside were hand-sketched maps, coded delivery routes, and a scrawled inventory list. "Yeah."
"Then help me find out which grid still has medicine left. I can't remember if B7 had the cold storage or if we already emptied it last year."
Yuta sat beside her on the floor, studying the pages.
Kuro joined them halfway through the evening, arms full of mushrooms and a dented thermos.
Yuta helped him sort the edible ones. Kuro grinned.
"You ever read The Weeping Ranger?" he asked suddenly.
Yuta blinked. "No."
"It's a story about a hunter who can't die until he saves the last forest," Kuro said, eyes shining. "Mama used to read it to me when I was sick. I tried to find a copy again. Couldn't."
"I'll look for it," Yuta said softly.
Kuro beamed. "Promise?"
Yuta hesitated. Then nodded.
"Promise."
A week passed.
They patched leaks in the roof together. Boiled water in scavenged steel drums. Ate fungus stew over weak fire.
It wasn't comfortable.
But it was real.
One night, when the wind howled through the orchard and the sky churned above with distant storm clouds, Yuta sat with Ayane beside the rusted pump.
She passed him a small glass bottle with a thimble's worth of alcohol.
"Not from this world, are you?" she asked.
Yuta didn't react.
"You don't smell like us. Don't carry Terra's rot."
Yuta turned the bottle in his hands. "No."
Ayane took a deep breath.
"You miss them?"
Yuta stared into the dark. "Every second."
Silence.
Then Ayane said, "My husband used to think this world was salvageable. Said we just needed time. But Terra doesn't give time. It only takes it."
Yuta looked at her.
"Why are you still fighting, then?"
She didn't look back. Her voice was steady.
"Because my son thinks the world's still worth drawing."
Yuta clenched the bottle. Quiet. Then...
"I had a friend once," he said. "He couldn't talk without hurting people. So he learned to listen and other language instead. Everyone called his gift a weapon, but he never used it like that. Not unless he had to."
Ayane didn't speak.
Yuta's voice dropped to a whisper.
"Sometimes I hear his voice. In my head. When I see someone scared. Or trying to be brave. It's like... the memory of what kindness sounds like."
Ayane leaned back, closed her one good eye.
"That's rare here."
Later that night, Yuta found Kuro asleep on the floor again, curled up with a blanket and two sketchbooks beneath his head.
He picked up one and flipped through it.
Pages of dreams. Winged beasts. A house in a city with glass towers. A robot carrying groceries. A sun without clouds.
Then, near the end.
Three stick figures.
One was tall with a scarf and a sword.
One was small with big eyes and a book.
The last had wild hair and a broken leg.
All of them were smiling.
Yuta closed the book slowly.
His hands trembled.
Not from grief.
But from something he hadn't felt in so long, it almost scared him to name it.
Hope.