POV: Suzushina Yuriko
Fear.
The taste of iron in her mouth. The imprint of a fist on her abdomen. Familiar pain.
The sky stretched above her like the ground stretched above her like the sky— Her shoes flung over her head. Her head flung over her shoes. Yuriko was spinning. Careening, maybe. Pain dulled the edge of the numbers around her. She was a drunken ballerina, dancing along a stage as Euclidian as memory, until her shoes found the mud, and the mud provided traction. Dynamic friction. It grounded her.
She staggered as she rose to half her height. She swayed and spat a globule of red into the soil.
He was coming. Now that Satoru wasn't hiding, she could feel him like a bright spot against the backdrop of the energy his last attack released.
Familiar pain. Familiar fear.
Her stomach throbbed, and soon a man was standing above her. For just a moment, Yuriko had returned to a certain kitchen in the Miyagi prefecture. For just a moment she was surrounded by spilled fragrance; the wreckage of a soup too cold. Fear.
But Satoru was moving slower and a little too carefully for her memories to sit. He approached her like she was made of goddamn glass. Like he could break her with a single touch.
The pain was familiar. What came next, she wasn't quite used to.
"You did well," he said, exhaling as the concern on his face sublimated into something more insulting than relief. Satoru's eyes softened, his lips tilted gently upward. Warmth, definitively. But it was a warmth that was different to Yuji's, Sasaki's or Iguchi's. It felt—
"Stop."
"Hm?"
"W-why did you stop?" It felt like a conclusion. And while she was afraid, they would continue, the fear of stopping gripped her even firmer. "It's only been two minutes, forty-two seconds, and four hundred and twenty milliseconds. I can still fight."
Satoru's face dropped.
"And you're still smiling."
"...Are you for real?" he asked.
"I'm for real, real."
"You can barely stand."
"And— " She wheezed. "And you nearly ripped your own arm off just to punch me, once." A shift in his micro-expression confirmed her assertion. Satoru's right sleeve had torn, the skin at the end of his knuckles looked raw; new.
"Oh, this?" He held up his hand, and Yuriko watched as the skin bubbled then lost its pallor. "This had nothing to with you, don't worry. And the fight? Yeah, that's over. Nanami'd call me irresponsible if I let it continue. You did well."
Well? Well? She was keeling over and gasping for air after one move, what the hell did he mean by well? Against her health and better judgement, Yuriko gritted her teeth and forced rigidity into her body. Pain made her calculations more demanding, but it also deepened her focus.
It was probably why she didn't notice Satoru's hand until it was already on her shoulder. Until it was already on her...
"What?"
"Don't look so shocked, geez."
The pressure remained. "How?"
Satoru shrugged. "Remember how you explained your fight with Sukuna to me?" Cursed energy roared into life along his other arm. "Wasn't that hard to figure out how he did it through theory. An 'unimbued' domain that sucks your technique in on contact... Heian era sorcery was quite advanced."
"You've... had a way..."
"To hit you from the start? Yeah."
"Then why...?"
"Didn't I use it? I wanted a model—wait, what am I saying?" Satoru slapped his cheek. "It just never crossed my mind to beat you that way. You mostly did it for Yuji, but you still trusted me enough to tell me. I guess I just didn't want to take that for granted?"
Oh. Oh. Oh no. How fucking corny. Why was it making her feel better? Why was she starting to feel so happ—
"But you know, I've won now, so what's the point?"
Yuriko lunged.
Not fast enough. Satoru cancelled Sukuna's trick before she'd even moved. Which meant his stupid technique was back online. So, she had crashed, face first, into infinity like a child pressing their face against a window.
"Scawwy. You know, I never would have imagined on the day we met, you'd be such a battle junkie."
"I'm not a—fight back."
Asymptote. Asymptote... The longer Yuriko she was pressed against his 'barrier' the less certain she became of her initial assessment. A new model was taking shape in her mind; it didn't deviate too far from the old one: calculus.
'Eight points', Satoru had said. Right methodology, wrong conclusion...?
A throbbing ache lanced through her stomach. Yuriko dropped to her knees and Satoru made the effortless switch to his 'unimbued domain,' catching her before she hit the ground.
"I can get you to Shoko."
She half-glared, half-winced, but not at him. She was glaring at the model. A simple graph in her head plotting only three axes along space.
"It'll take three seconds, but you have to let me—"
"A limit."
"..."
"Yo-you can't be asymptote. You exist here in this world." Red eyes met blue. "I can feel you," she croaked. "See you. Hear you. Whether it takes ten steps to get to where you are, or every step, you exist here. In this world. In physical space."
Imagine a simple number line stretching from one to ten. Now imagine that line contained the entire world, and each number was somehow a co-ordinate in space. Yuriko placed herself at 'one', naturally, and dropped Satoru at 'two'.
Assuming each 'step' could be completed by simple addition, it would be easy enough to close the distance by adding one. But between the numbers were sub-pockets of space, sub-worlds, placed insidiously along an infinite number line between them.
It was easy to get to two by adding one, but Satoru's technique forced her to add a third; then a sixth, then a tenth and so on, and so forth. Forever.
Between Suzushina Yuriko and Gojo Satoru was an invisible wall known as 'convergence.' After an infinite number of steps down the sequence, she would 'converge' at 'two.' Was it still simple?
Somewhere between the last word she had spoken, and the last thought she'd conjured, Satoru unceremoniously dumped her on the mud. But she was lost in her thoughts, not even registering her new position as she stared at Satoru the way she used to stare at math problems she couldn't solve.
He didn't stand the way an opponent should. There were less than two minutes now, of her promised five, and he was completely at ease. Worse than that, he was still smiling. It was the kind of smile she had learned to recognise in her early education. The kind of smile a teacher gave when they scanned her worksheet minutes before the exams concluded. An expression that, with every muscle, exuded reassurance.
'You did your best.' It seemed to say.
Hell no.
Against the illusory ticking of a clock, Yuriko lifted the pen in her mind and got to solving.
Infinite acceleration?
Not possible. Not for her. She needed to borrow the energy from somewhere. Where the hell would she find infinite momentum? What would that do to Satoru even if I found it?
???
What would that look like in the real world? It was far more abstract than—wait, weren't vectors themselves all abstractions anyway? Then she had to ask the question from the first hypothetical. What would that do to him? Fear. She filed the methodology away.
How had Sukuna done it?
Yuriko put her hands together. Each finger met its counterpart on the other hand until she slid her index and pinkie fingers down. Jujutsu, conceptually, was woefully mired in mysticism. Despite their proximity to mathematics, barriers couldn't be formed without specific hand signs, written seals, or effigies. Then there were the countless parallels with religion. Satoru's 'Six Eyes' were to the fives eyes of Buddhism as Sukuna's hand seal was to—
She glared at her own fingers as the gesture took form.
—Fate, death, and the underworld. Enmaten: the King of Hell. Some high fucking opinion that bastard had of himself.
A violent current of cursed energy poured out from every cell. Cracks spider-webbed from her feet. She was the origin. Her 'soul', her mind, her body: a world unto herself. The 0,0,0 co-ordinate through which everything flowed. The rain forgot it was falling. The clouds forgot they were overcast, as a curtain of light descended upon her. A micro-twitch flickered in the corner of her teacher's lips, and for just the slightest frame of existence, Suzushina Yuriko was the brightest, loudest thing there ever was.
"Domain Expansion."
***
POV: Gojo Satoru
Truly, love might have been the most twisted and insidious curse of all.
He couldn't see them all. Those little expressions of her mother's power—that bound anything and all things together like a universal emulsifier. The metal was in Yuriko's cursed energy. All the time.
Everything fell into place when the sparks of black detonated between them and lined his fist with metal.
Her cursed energy control that was poor relative to her talent. Her abnormal sensitivity.
'Sorcerer. Leave,' Hatsuko had said.
Satoru couldn't blame her. Whatever her reasons for keeping her daughter isolated, he was sure that they stemmed from a lack of trust for Jujutsu society.
The higher ups cast children in the stream of curses, like their bodies would delay the flow. Worse still was what they did with the gifted children who fell outside the margins. They tried to act so holier-than-thou when they were rationalising Yuta's execution, but Satoru remembered. He remembered the whispers that spoke of a boy who could subsume cursed spirits under his control. He remembered that he was a 'threat' long before the words 'Special Grade' were ever associated with a young Geto Suguru.
So, he could understand—even if he would never approve— why Suzushina Hatsuko had elected to bury her daughter's talent so deeply that the girl herself would never be able to find it.
But find it, she had.
"Domain expansion."
Yuriko was close. She was so close that his elation overflowed. Four months—a quarter of that time spent without even knowing what cursed energy was, and she was so, so damn close.
But then the world decided to make sense again, and like a malformed clay pot in a furnace, the barrier crumbled as it took shape.
"Dammit." Her reserves plummeted down to what he would charitably classify as five Megumis.
"Woah, it's like watching a caveman draw the Kanagawa Great Wave in crayon."
"..."
"It's a compliment! I'm... complimenting you." Satoru held his palms up in mock surrender. "Not a bad attempt, but you don't have nearly enough experience to—"
"Domain expansion!"
"You didn't even do anything that ti—"
"Domain expansion!"
"Stop it."
"Fine." she sighed.
Finally, "Shoko time?"
"Ryouiki Tenkai!"
"..."
"It was an experiment," she muttered. "I was experimenting."
"Since when were you funny?"
"You think I'm joking?"
"You're not?"
Her frown deepened. "Not even a little. That was my last plan to hit you—"
"Hehe."
"—without killing you by accident."
"Come again?"
***
POV: Kugisaki Nobara
Nobara's teeth drew blood against her bottom lip. They were talking now, but that was cold comfort. They'd been talking before. Even now, she could see that familiar stubbornness etched in Yuriko's body language, and the gears turning in her cousin's little mind. She could see most of all the expectant stance of Gojo Satoru.
Yuriko was still in danger; she was still a danger to herself.
In the wake of the last explosion, Nobara had easily pried her hammer-arm free from the over-boiled potato. Cursed energy flowed along the limb as she flexed her fingers. Nobody noticed. Not the blonde man speaking in Kansai-ben, or his father. Amongst the throng of adults and witnesses, nobody paid a lick of attention to the country girl.
When typhoons collided, would anyone spare a thought for raindrops pitter-patting next to them?
Normally, the thought of being ignored would infuriate Kugisaki Nobara. Today, that was exactly what she wanted. So, it followed that nobody noticed as she grabbed something beneath her seat. Something fibrous, and soft, and utterly drenched by the elements.
Her hammer slid down her sleeve, and the hair she'd stolen from Gojo's blindfold dropped onto the doll.
Nobara lifted the hammer, and prepared to—
***
POV: Suzushina Yuriko
"Come again?"
"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz," Yuriko muttered.
"Who?"
"17th Century mathematician. Discovered telescoping."
"Cool." He folded his arms. "How does that help you?"
"Limitless...The name of your technique isn't quite accurate." Satoru raised an eyebrow. She continued, "O-one, plus a third, plus a sixth, then a tenth. Even though the numbers are getting smaller, you'd think that the infinite sequence of their partial sums would, similarly, be infinite. Plot it on a graph, and you'd get a slope that never plateaus. A divergent series?" Yuriko swallowed a lungful of air. "Leibniz proved otherwise. Thus, telescoping."
"Impressive! Ten points! It's no wonder you've developed your technique so well without a manual."
Compliments. Rarely received. Never taken well. They were either always backhanded or were far grander than the sum of her parts. 'Impressive.' Sure. It was true. She didn't have a manual, but she did have him and, in many ways, that was better than a manual. In others... Accelerator. The One Who Wields the Power of God. Not her. Not Suzushina Yuriko. Everything 'impressive' about her came from him the way xeroxes came out from printers.
It started on the rooftop, when her limited understanding had almost cut her new life short. She told herself then that it was maturity, that she was being careful, but Yuriko was just rationalising her fear away.
And she was afraid.
Fear. Every time numbers roared through her mind, there was—Fear. Every breeze that could become a hurricane at her fingertips. Fear, for every little slice of momentum that she stole from the earth.
Yuriko had stopped innovating. Or maybe she had never tried innovating in the first place. Her reflection was hisreflection. Her wind was his wind.
Fear. Over time, because of fear, his strength was the only strength she pursued. His ideas were her only counsel, and now his pain—born of his weakness—was twisting her stomach into knots.
"Whatever I dish out at you," she said, lifting her eyes to find Satoru's. For a moment, they looked every bit as red to her as her own. "You can take it, can't you?"
A pause, and then a chuckle. Satoru threw his hands up, settling into a quasi-martial arts' stance that he clearly devised on the spot. The man's voice resonated with a pride that went beyond surety.
"Don't sweat it," he boasted. "I'm the strongest."
Fear... was fading away without a trace. A smile slithered its way onto her face.
"That remains to be seen."
Yuriko took her own stance. It had nothing to do with anything at all.
***
A/N: Fight ends next chapter
Domain Amplification: