.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.
25 December 2014, Tokyo Metropolitan Children's Medical Center
Satoru Gojo landed outside the Children's Hospital in one minute and twelve seconds.
Too slow, in his opinion; he'd shortened distance as much as physics and Limitless allowed, until the streets blurred into nothing. It was a miracle, really, that no civilian had been dragged into the distortion or pancaked into the side of a building, and normally, he'd congratulate himself if he wasn't sucking air as if he'd just run a marathon.
Unacceptable.
But lungs could complain later, because right now... The Red Ward opened around him, swallowing the building whole. Entry was easy; the kekkai let one in. Leaving was the real problem. Inside, the air and every breath had weight.
Satoru shoved his cursed energy output into his chest to reinforce his lungs on instinct until the burn dulled. Double the amount he had estimated he'd need. The Six Eyes parsed the kekkai instantly: the atmosphere was saturated with red mist and the contagion nearly immediate. He was standing in a living disease.
So this is a Red Ward.
He tilted his head back: the dome above wasn't black like the Curtain choking the Tokyo hospital he'd just left behind, where Kaoru—and Suguru, if he was honest with himself—waited. This one was crimson like a beating heart against the night sky and the snow. He'd dismantled more barriers than he could count, but this one? Double-layered, resistant. He could tear it down if he tried, but the building would go down with it, which meant Scarlet Mist would slip away while he was busy picking up rubble and explaining to the higher-ups why there were no survivors. And this wasn't just any hospital; this was pediatrics.
So, not an option.
But if the kekkai was still up, it meant Scarlet Mist was still inside.
Fog filled the hospital's corridors, wet against the skin, and Satoru realized the dossiers hadn't done it justice; none had captured its reality.
He shoved a hand through his white hair in irritation. "So this is what flattened Yu-kun in under ten minutes, seven years ago. Guess he wasn't exaggerating."
How do civilians survive even a minute of this?
His jaw set, because the answer was obvious. They don't.
The fog shifted, and suddenly the sounds found him: whimpers from nurses, ragged cries of parents, hiccuping sobs of pain, of calling for mothers, fathers. His Six Eyes supplied a quick math: six hundred and eighty-seven signatures inside. None with the distinct curve of a sorcerer's; non-sorcerers, all of them.
Another detail slotted into place, variations in cursed energy so faint they barely registered, except he knew them. His fist clenched hard enough to sting. Children; roughly half of the hospital.
Suguru, you're really doing this? You brought this down on children?
He already knew, Suguru had said it himself, years ago, as clear as any sermon. Non-sorcerers don't matter. Kill them, the world gets better. He had argued; he still couldn't stop him from leaving, but Satoru, in his arrogance, had believed—no, he'd decided—that Suguru would never drag it this far, that some line existed.
And now? A mass grave of sick children waiting to happen.
Maybe he could blame Scarlet Mist; Satoru could cling to that theory if he wanted. Nice excuses, easier than facing that Suguru didn't need convincing. No. Suguru had conviction, and Scarlet Mist was just the perfect partner, a Vengeful Spirit who could spin Red Wards wide enough to trap whole hospitals full of civilians. A match made in hell. And they had split him and Kaoru.
Kaoru… is she already fighting him? Can she handle it?
A flash of irrational panic caught in his chest. Was he worried for Kaoru's sake, or Suguru's? He hadn't seen Kaoru enough in a real fight to measure her against Suguru, but... His brain tied itself into knots, every angle wrong; he didn't like the answer.
Don't think about that. Focus.
A part of him, the part that hadn't been excised even after years, still didn't want Suguru dead, still wanted something left to save. And that meant—what? Hoping Kaoru would lose this fight, dooming the Kusakabes and everyone else? He didn't want Suguru dead yet; he didn't want Kaoru dead either; he wanted… he wasn't sure. He should be praying that Kaoru killed Suguru outright; the higher-ups would probably throw her a parade she'd hate, the civilians would sleep safer, and it would even save him the trouble of killing Suguru with his own hands.
It should be simple.
Instead, he dreaded that she might actually succeed where he hadn't. What did that make him? Pathetic. And the shame of that—standing here, in a hospital full of dying kids—was enough to make bile creep up his throat.
Satoru blew out a slow breath, shoved the thought into the same locked box where he kept everything else he didn't want to look at. Not now; later, if later even existed.
Blue snapped under his soles, and the corridor jumped forward. His Six Eyes parsed the labyrinth of fog, reading density, signatures. Another Blue-blink, and another; the red mist thickened, tacky against his throat, and he started an RCT healing loop around his lungs before the disease—tuberculosis, fittingly ironic—could eat at the tissue. His throat burned anyway.
A nurse stumbled into view, a boy slung across her back as she clawed along the wall with blood leaking from her mouth; too little air went in. The boy's arm dangled like a dead weight with no breath, probably gone long before; Satoru wondered if she even realized. Her knee gave out, and she hit the tiles face-first, the boy toppling with her as blood spread across the linoleum. Neither moved again. He looked at them for a second too long, enough to burn the image into the back of his eyelids, then he kept walking; he couldn't stop, couldn't help, not even Uzuya's son and husband somewhere in here. He could hear her voice in his head demanding why, and the answer already tasted like ash: Because if I stop, everyone else would die too. Because Scarlet Mist would escape. Because it might already be too late for the boy anyway.
Uzuya'd understand.
…Wouldn't she?
Blue snapped again, and he found himself in another hallway with more bodies piling up and a knot of kids huddled together, three too still, one barely wheezing. He Blue-blinked past them to another floor, where, from a half-open door, came a child's voice rasping "mama, mama, mama" until it broke.
Satoru shut his eyes and forced his brain to stop cataloging the sound.
Another Blue-blink and another stretch of ruined hallway. There. A dense cursed energy, warping the haze itself, the core, Scarlet Mist, and beside it, a second signature anchored, likely its cursed weapon.
"Scarlet mist," Satoru muttered, rolling his shoulders and cracking his knuckles as if he were bored rather than furious. His smile curved, but it was utterly unamused. "Found you."
He pushed the door with two fingers until the hinges squealed. The Six Eyes had already drawn the map before stepping in: four small beds, pastel animal murals on faded paint, two heartbeats still beating, half a dozen already gone. Still, the sight managed to scrape across his nerves anyway. Two kids half-fallen from their cots in a failed escape, adults—parents, nurses—collapsed where they'd tried to shield them, and on the last bed, by the window, three figures: two children, alive, each leaned against the shoulders of someone who absolutely had no right to be there.
A boyish silhouette with a scarf the color of fresh blood looped around his throat, and a sky-blue haori slipping wide, with white crest patterns on the sleeves. Brown hair tied high, swaying with the tilt of his head as he hummed a tune under his breath, childish and off-key, framing a youthful face and an open smile.
Scarlet Mist. Okita Sōji, or what was left of him.
This was their terror from the reports? The cheerful ghost of a Shinsengumi prodigy with tuberculosis in his lungs? He looked more like a kid playing samurai dress-up. Except his eyes were crimson, except his smile was too wide, except one hand stroked a child's hair like a doll, while the other gripped a naginata planted on the floor, haloed in red cursed energy. The Crimson Binding Halberd. Kaoru had lectured him about it as if it were her favorite bedtime story until Satoru's ears bled. He'd tuned half of it out, sure, but he remembered enough: one of the Three Heirlooms. Lovely. He'd already smashed one of those things last year; he could smash another. The problem was the children.
Scarlet Mist finally seemed to notice him. His head jerked, eyes widening, lips parting in a delighted little ah! "How careless of me, I didn't notice you there," he chirped, grin tugging dimples into his cheeks, disturbingly warm. His hand never stopped smoothing over the girl's hair. "Gojo Satoru himself! Head of the Gojo clan! How exciting!"
The kids flinched, shrinking closer to him.
Satoru walked to the center of the room, squelching on blood. "This is your plan, Scarlet Mist? Hiding behind kids?" He chuckled, mocking without effort. "Didn't think you would be this stupid. Or this boring."
Scarlet Mist hummed thoughtfully, then tenderly tapped the girl's head one last time and lifted her from his shoulder, tucking her into the pillow. Her eyes fluttered closed. "Better this way. They won't notice a thing while they sleep." He stretched his arms overhead, geta clacking on the floor as the naginata spun lazy arcs with crimson mist curling around it. "I always loved children."
Satoru's grin flattened into a line as his Six Eyes caught the girl's chest faltering under the scarlet fog curling at her lips; he wanted to fold the room in half, crush this brat into paste where he stood, and be done with it, but the kids were too close. His nails dug crescents into his palms instead as Kaoru's voice echoed in his head: Don't underestimate him. Fine; time to destabilize him, drag him away from the children. He could work with words as easily as with Limitless.
"Loved children?" Satoru said, tone featherlight in that way of his. "You've got a funny way of showing love. Tucking them in and choking them out? Guess you were a sadist even before you kicked it. Okita Sōji, right? A rough way to go for a samurai like you, dying of tuberculosis instead of a sword. Bet you hated that."
For the first time, the boyish smile cracked, and Scarlet Mist's lips pressed thin, brows wrinkling like a sulky child denied candy. His naginata scraped sparks as he dragged it across the floor. "A simple arrangement," he sang, eyes cold and no longer matching the tone. "I handle the … non-sorcerers." He gestured vaguely with the weapon at the room, toward the unconscious bodies.
Non-sorcerers. Of course: Suguru's fingerprints were all over this, as if Satoru needed more confirmation.
"And in return," Scarlet Mist went on, "he helps me get the last thing I need to—"
"—Destroy the Big Three Clans?" Satoru cut him off, yawning into his palm. "Yeah, heard that one before. You're a brokenecho, Okita. Gotta say, for a prodigy who supposedly died young, you're awfully fixated on history books."
That stung. "... I'm a broken echo?" The childish pout twisted as red fog hissed against the walls.
Oh. He was getting under his skin. Satoru pressed. "Broooken~! What's the real sob story here? To burn the jujutsu world and wipe out the clans for what? Your Sensei didn't clap you loud enough? A family tragedy? Or just plain didn't like your doctor?" He gasped theatrically. "Oh, wait. Don't tell me—it's all three!"
The naginata hissed through the air in a furious but precise arc, cursed energy cracking the plaster. A burst snapped the walls, shaking dust loose from the ceiling.
There it was, the crack in the mask.
"You Big Three never change," Scarlet Mist murmured, suddenly serious. "Always above justice and above honor. Always laughing while the world rots, leaving behind the one you labeled broken." His stance shifted, naginata leveled as his cursed energy spiked. "I'll start with you, Gojo-dono."
Satoru smirked, not bothering to raise a guard stance, though every muscle sang with tension. RCT churned in his lungs, fighting the fog's creeping infection. Keep the RCT loop running while fighting, keep the kids alive through all this, take down the Vengeful Spirit of the strongest sorcerers of the Bakumatsu; that'd be hell, but he'd done worse. He glanced briefly at the two children on the bed.
Good thing multitasking was his specialty.
A child coughed wetly, and that was the bell; they moved at once.
Scarlet Mist moved first, his naginata dragging across the floor and sparks spitting from the blade as he closed the distance in a breath. He was faster than reports or his legend suggested, but Satoru Gojo was faster still; midway across the room, he Blue-blinked and reappeared behind him, finger cocked at his skull and Red blooming like a miniature sun at his fingertip. Point-blank; he'd do it point-blank. From this angle, the blast would rip through the ceiling and toward the sky, and the kids might just live to scream about it. Perfect.
"Game over, scarlet brat," Satoru muttered.
He fired—
—or tried.
Scarlet Mist spun like a kid showing off in a dojo, his naginata twisting up in an arc so fast it burned the air around it.
The golden blade clipped the Red mid-birth; the light sputtered and died between his fingers.
Satoru blinked. The hell happened? He hadn't misfired a Red since he was seventeen, and that was frankly embarrassing. "...Huh." His smile widened, but his eyes narrowed. "So the 'Swiftest Blade in Kyoto' thing wasn't a fairy tale after all."
Okita giggled, genuinely proud at the praise. "Did I surprise you, Gojo-dono?"
Satoru's jaw flexed, just once. Damn this cursed brat. His feet scraped back, and then he slammed forward again, Blue already blooming in his palm; the pull field expanded with a gravitational hum. If he couldn't pierce him, he'd tear him apart atom by atom. The ceiling near the door collapsed, but the Kids were still unharmed and out of reach for now. Scarlet Mist smirked feral and shifted, elbow tucked and blade coiled low, his weight behind the hip.
A kata Satoru knew too well from Kaoru's lessons.
Sandanzuki.
Kaoru had drilled that kata into him a hundred times, smug every single damn time she explained it: the signature triple thrust that Okita Sōji had made infamous, the fastest and deadliest strike in Kyoto. He'd joked about stabbing his ears shut just to stop hearing about it. And now here it was, in the flesh.
Cute.
Didn't matter. Infinity was Infinity, the thrust couldn't reach him—
Except it did. Satoru saw it, saw the exact moment his technique slipped, erased, nullified.
The naginata blurred, downstroke first, rising arc next—
"Shit—"
Steel kissed fabric and the skin just above his heart. Satoru snapped a Blue orb up before the strike could finish the pattern to the three vital points, ripped a chunk of ceiling loose, and hurled it down with a pull spike. The room shook as plaster rained and the wall cratered where Scarlet Mist had been; the beds rattled but didn't collapse, as dust and smoke filled the room and he Blue-blinked space apart, dragging himself out of range of the damn naginata.
Scarlet Mist's laughter bubbled up through the haze. Dust shifted, the slab cracked down the center and lifted, and he stood beneath, grinning ear to ear, patting the grit out of his hair with quick little slaps. "Ahhh, that was scary, Gojo-dono! You almost messed up my precious haori!" He pouted, bottom lip jutting.
Satoru rolled his shoulder once, testing the joint: a superficial, shallow cut, not even bleeding properly, still, he almost coughed up blood as his lungs rasped as if they belonged to someone dying of tuberculosis. Apparently, the infection was carried to its maximal payload in that blade, worse than all the mist choking the hospital. A small cut like that was enough to force even him to increase his RCT output. He swallowed it down hard; he would not give the brat the satisfaction of seeing him hack up blood. He was fine. But that wasn't the point. The point was that the halberd had ignored Infinity, not just cut through distance, but cut through him. His Six Eyes dragged across the blade, parsing it even as blood cooled on his sleeve; he knew that ability to nullify cursed technique, had seen it first-hand.
The Inverted Spear of Heaven.The weapon he had shattered with his own hands.
Kaoru's voice rang in his head, nerdy as he ranted about the Three Heirlooms: Once, they were all one. Together, a god-killer, divided because it couldn't be destroyed. Three fragments, three Heirlooms. He remembered calling her a history teacher, remembered her rolling her eyes.
"Oh-oh," he muttered under his breath.
Maybe shattering that weapon hadn't been the neat solution he thought it was. If destroying it had kicked its ability down the line to the other fragments, if he'd made the other two Heirlooms worse, then...
Congratulations, Gojo Satoru; you just upgraded your enemies.
Scarlet Mist had just vaulted from "annoying" to "borderline catastrophic," but he didn't have the luxury of dragging the fight against a lunatic man-child with a god-slaying weapon.
Satoru wiped his bloody palm against his ruined sleeve, grin slotting back into place. "Cute trick," he drawled, voice light. "Pretty sure your toy isn't supposed to do that."
Scarlet Mist swayed on his feet, sticking out his tongue like a brat about to throw a tantrum. His naginata spun before planting into the ground with too much force, cracking it. "I told you, didn't I? I'll erase the Three Great Clans! One, two, three—" He stomped each number with his geta, voice breaking into a giggle. "Starting with you."
Satoru's jaw clenched so faintly it didn't reach his grin as his Six Eyes flicked—once—back to the bed.
The little girl's chest hitched once, then stopped.
.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.
25 December 2014, Tokyo Medical University Hospital
There was nothing but silence, save for the hum of dead lights and the metallic stink of blood.
But none of it mattered, not when those winter-blue eyes were looking back at her; eyes she had sworn she'd never see again. Four hundred years, and still she knew them instantly, familiar enough to hurt, to undo her. For an instant, the centuries fell away. Kaoru's jaw clenched until her temples throbbed, and her grip on the katana's hilt was so tight the blade trembled in her hand.
Fake, she repeated herself, over and over, like a prayer. Fake, fake, fake, damn fake. You know better than this. Don't be an idiot.
Her body didn't care; her legs only moved when he did. She forced her heel back a step, and of course, he matched it with a step forward, lazy, careless. Seijiro Gojo, damn him, always walked as if the world could catch fire, and he'd still stroll through it with a smile.
His voice came softly. "Kaoru—"
"Save it." She cut him off before he could wrap her in whatever sweetness he thought he was playing at.
For the briefest instant, he blinked, startled; then, his face softened and melted not into the wolfish grin, not into the mask he wore for his clan or his father or the world, but into the other smile, the soft curve of the lips he'd only ever shown her and the same one he'd worn bleeding out in an endless dusk and a starless sky, when he pushed Mame into her hair with bloodied fingers, distracting her from realizing what he was planning behind her back.
And with that same look—curse him—he said the words that broke her chest wide open. "I'm sorry. For going first somewhere you couldn't follow me."
Kaoru's breath shattered instantly as Seijiro stepped closer, unhurried, confident, as he'd never left her side. The mirror in his hands reflected a pale gleam between them. She should have moved, should have raised her katana, should have done anything but stand there, but her feet rooted to the floor as he reached the last pace between them.
"I see you still wear it," he murmured half-proud, tilting his head toward the comb buried in her black hair. "The comb I made for you."
Her hand betrayed her, lifting before she could stop it; fingers brushed Mame, and Mame pulsed erratically against her scalp, warning and yearning at once, then quieted, unnervingly calm, like it recognized its creator. "Mame." Her throat scraped raw when she whispered weakly. "It's the only piece of you I had left."
"You named it?" He laughed, light and careless, exactly the same as she remembered. "And I thought I was the one with terrible nicknames."
Her mouth opened, empty of words. How many times had she dreamed this? Dreams, hallucinations, whatever passed for sleep in four centuries; reuniting somewhere no clan, no war, no duty could touch them or tear them apart. She had only ever found him in memory, until now. Except he wasn't. Except this wasn't now. It couldn't be. Except—
"It wasn't my intention to curse you like that." His voice turned sober. "Not to make you wait forever."
Her fingers went slack; the katana slipped from her hand and clattered against linoleum, echoing down the corridor. That—that wait forever detail—no one knew, no one except her. And Hisanobu. And Seijiro.
Wasn't that proof enough?
Her lips trembled around the question slipping out without her consent. "…Is it you? Really? Not an illusion?"
His smile sharpened at the edges, too subtle for her dazed mind to catch as he slid the mirror into the sleeve of his haori. "What? Don't tell me you've forgotten my pretty face already."
He pouted, ridiculous, Gojo-style, the way he used to just to make her roll her eyes, the exact way Satoru had inherited, then he closed the last breath of distance between them. Kaoru should've driven her blade through his chest and ended it; instead, her body gave out, and a long sigh pulled from her bones after too long. She tilted her head back, eyes searching his like a fool, sure her own face was pitiful and pleading, but she didn't care.
"You—" The word cracked. She bit her lip hard, hands shaking as they lifted and bunched weakly in the sleeves of his haori to... Drag him close? Push him off? She didn't know, and that was terrifying. "You bastard," she muttered, bitter and aching. "We promised together. And you left me behind. Alone."
Her head suddenly swam, too light, and the edges of her vision smeared. Mame went disturbingly silent for the first time in four centuries.
Seijiro slowly raised his hands in return, cradling her face; she didn't flinch, didn't resist, let his palms settle against her cheeks. Later, she would curse herself for it, remembering how cold that touch was, icy enough to burn. "Sshh. I know." His thumb stroked her cheek, tender, maddening. "You've carried it all this time. That's never what I wanted for you. It must have been hard, but you've been so strong."
The world dulled, sound muffled, and her thoughts blurred, heavy fog settling over everything until her limbs felt foreign and distant. She couldn't move, couldn't look away. But why would she? Seijiro was here. Her Seijiro.
He bent closer, tilting her chin up with care, as though she were the most precious thing in the world; he had always been good at seeing her like that, too much, like someone worth loving and saving. His lips brushed hers, feather-light, the smallest contact, and her body slumped weakly against his as his arms caught her.
"Now—" Flat words came from Seijiro, detached, as his lips lingered on hers. "—now you don't have to wait anymore. Now we can fix that mistake. Together, just as we promised."
She barely registered the words; she was already sinking, her senses sliding into a dreamlike haze. The fog around her mind was too thick, the warmth too real; every instinct quieted as her head lolled and her lashes fell heavy. The last thing she registered was how good it felt to close her eyes and stay there with him, just for a second.
Just one second.
And in that one second, the world slipped away.
When she blinked her eyes open again, time had shifted. A minute? An hour? An eternity? She couldn't tell. The corridor was still there, ceiling and tiles, but her vision dragged past his shoulder, where a single orb of foxfire floated at his back, blue and lazy. On the far wall, the shadows told the truth: not two figures, not one man and one woman, but a twisting shape crowned with nine tails.
Her stomach turned cold. Seijiro? she thought dumbly, as her sluggish mind stuttered. What—
Seijiro was no longer at her lips; he was bent lower, pressed against her neck.
She felt it before she understood, still trapped in that strange paralysis; heat and wetness sluicing down her collarbone and arm, soaking her uniform and dripping from her fingers to the floor with tiny, obscene taps.
Blood. Her blood.
Then came the pain: white-hot, tearing agony at the crook of her neck, radiating down her shoulder, as a raw nerve ripped open, mixed with the sound of a predator tearing through flesh and muscle. Her breath came fast, panic surged where reason failed; she bit down on the inside of her cheek, tasting iron on iron, and slowly, her eyes shifted downward to the source of the pain. There, she caught the jade earrings swaying where Seijiro's head rested, strands of white hair falling loose and stained where they brushed her blood; his jaw moved, teeth deep in the flesh of her neck, the pain unbearable as he tore through muscles and nerves.
"Wh—what—" she gasped in a broken sound.
The head at her neck lifted just enough, as if to indulge her with the courtesy of seeing his face. His mouth showed animal fangs, and blood dripped in slow trails down his chin, warm and sticky against her collarbone. The face was Seijiro's, yes, but the expression—the blue eyes she had wanted so badly to believe in—belonged to no human.
Whatever that thing was, it was eating her alive.
Kaoru stared, dazed, but he didn't look alarmed in the slightest; in fact, the bastard looked satisfied and drunk on her blood, as though her shaking voice was a spice on the meat he had sunk his teeth into. "Back to sleep, Pretty Boy," the thing crooned, parody-soft, hands still cupping her shoulders like a lover's. "Flesh tastes sweeter when you humans are dreaming sweetly."
Her blood iced; that wasn't him, that could never be him. Her Seijiro was long gone, already passed into the world again, four hundred years later, wearing another name but still infuriating, still bearing all the things she hated, all the things she loved. That was her Seijiro now. Not this thing. Move. Move. Her body wouldn't obey as pain lanced through her again and the jaws ground deeper into the flesh of her shoulder. A gush of blood splashed warm against her cheek, and her vision became white. She bit back a gasp, convulsing from neck to heel. Think. Her mind snapped into order with the speed of survival. This thing is trying to eat me alive. What the hell is it? Her eyes rolled forward again, on the shadow cast by the fake Seijiro. Nine tails; and that blue orb of foxfire hovering at its back, drifting as if bored...
…A kitsune?
"Oh, great," she muttered bitterly through clenched teeth. "Of all the fucking curses, a yokai class, a Kitsune—"
Shape-shifting, hypnosis, mind-leeching. Classic kitsune tricks; but this one? This one knew too much. It hadn't just worn Seijiro's face but the private jokes, the apology no one living should know, the exact way his thumb had once traced her cheekbone. It knew things it shouldn't. That mirror. The damn mirror. Kaoru had let herself look; that was how it had crawled into her head, rifling through centuries of scars and tearing Seijiro's memory out of them as the best bait. To be undone by her own weakness, by her own heart, by something walking in Seijiro's skin and smiling his smile... pathetic. She hissed, lips sticky with iron.
"Amateur mistake," she told herself.
Another bite tore deeper, and her left arm went numb; another flood of blood ran down, and she could feel which tendons snapped in real time. Her shoulder wasn't knitting back; no Mame's automatic RCT ran along her meridians, nothing of the constant background healing she'd never asked for but known for four hundred years. Mame? No answer, no smug thrum of cursed energy, no protective Infinity around her; Mame, usually so alive when she called its name, was silent against her scalp. Was it trapped too? The kitsune had wound its illusion around her comb as well? Mame must have believed too that Seijiro was here, and she was safe. If the comb had a soul—and she suspected it did, after the centuries together—its eyes were full of Seijiro and the past. Loyal and useless.
"Wake up, you little thing," she spat in pain. "I don't have time for this."
Still nothing, only silence and the slap of blood hitting linoleum. Loyal and useless.
Fine. I'll do it the old way.
"You want to feed?" she muttered, hands twitching uselessly. "Then choke on this."
Kaoru bit down on a cry, forced her focus inward to her own RCT, manual output, sluggish, clumsy; she had never been good at it, and centuries of outsourcing to Mame had not improved her baseline, but she shoved anyway, dragging reversed cursed energy toward the wound. It wasn't enough to heal a wound like that, but to whatever curse had dared bite her? Corrosive as poison.
The reaction was instant.
The kitsune hissed, ripping back with a snarl that was not human, steam smoking from its lips where her blood scorched. He sprang away in a fox-slick arc, landing light, one arm thrown up to wipe her blood from its mouth with Seijiro's stolen hand. "Well, well," the kitsune drawled, licking her blood from his upper lip. "I didn't think you'd break it so fast. Minutes only, and you were already sinking so sweetly."
The haze fell away as Kaoru staggered upright; her mind was racing, assembling the pieces. Minutes, she realized as sensation crashed back into her fingers and toes. Minutes wasted. Minutes that belonged to the rescue of Uzuya and her brother.
"Pathetic," she hissed.
Her right hand found the mess at her collarbone. Wound felt generous for a bite crater where flesh had been torn out and tendon sliced; her left arm hung stupid and heavy, a dead weight attached to a living body. She swallowed down the grief of seeing Seijiro's face still standing there and forced her right hand to catch her left, unmoving, and align the dead weight of those fingers into a hand sign.
"Divine Dog: Totality."
Her shadow rippled and the corridor shook as her shikigami emerged: massive, white-striped black, claws tearing the linoleum. It growled low, crouching forward, nearly man-high, to stand between her and the kitsune.
Across from them, he—no, it—rolled a shoulder, and Seijiro's mouth hooked the wrong way. The single foxfire drifted at its side, lazy and smug. "Come on, Pretty Boy," it teased. "I gave you a perfect dream, a reunion with the man you love. Don't pretend you didn't want to stay there—"
"Oh, for—" Kaoru barked a humorless laugh. "Spare me. Unfortunately for you, I happen to know exactly where that man currently is." She scooped her katana up one-handed as her eyes stayed fixed on the kitsune. "Drop the act, kitsune."
Seijiro's stolen face blinked in surprise before settling back into pure disdain.
Kaoru narrowed her eyes further, tone flat. "Let me guess. I'm good at guessing. A powerful Kitsune like you leaves a short list of names. And that strange foxfire… I thought you'd been sealed again into your lovely stone a few decades back." She tilted her chin toward the floating foxfire. "Tamamo-no-Mae."