Kane prodded the rotting fencepost with his boot. It wobbled, flakes of grey paint drifting down like diseased snow. He sighed, staring toward the distant highway where semi-trucks shimmered in the noon heat like mirages. Another Tuesday wasted fixing Grandad's crumbling property line. Sweat glued his thin t-shirt to his back, itching fiercely.
He kicked a loose stone hard, scowling as it bounced into knee-high weeds. His phone buzzed—another ignored text from his boss. Why bother answering? Minimum wage stocking shelves wouldn't save this farm. Kane rubbed his temples, headaches drumming behind his eyes since breakfast. Every damn morning lately.
A sudden pressure slammed behind his eyelids, sharp as broken glass. Kane stumbled, vision swimming with blinding white flashes. Static roared in his ears, drowning out the cicadas. He gasped, clutching his skull as if to keep it from bursting outward. The world tilted violently.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
The stench hit first—burnt ozone and sour decay. Kane blinked at flickering fluorescent lights overhead. Cold steel pressed against his bare skin. He lay on some kind of examination table, surrounded by sterile white walls humming with unseen machinery. Panic clawed up his throat. Where the hell was the farm? The cicadas? The weeds?
SUMMARY^1: After a mundane morning maintaining his grandfather's dilapidated fence, Kane suffers excruciating headaches culminating in intense sensory agony. He collapses unconscious and awakens disoriented in a sterile, high-tech facility, suggesting he has been transported to an unfamiliar and possibly hostile environment.
He scrambled upright, stumbling off the table. His boots echoed sharply on polished concrete. Then came the noises: a hundred overlapping voices shouting in Japanese, English, Russian—a tidal wave of sound. Metal screeched somewhere overhead. Footsteps thundered down distant corridors. Kane pressed his palms against his ears, but the chaos drilled straight into his skull. He could *hear* a technician three rooms away muttering about "dimensional anomalies" and the rapid *beep-beep-beep* of a failing heart monitor two floors below.
Vision exploded next. Walls dissolved into shimmering layers—he saw wiring snaking behind plaster, air ducts twisting like metallic intestines, and beyond that...streets choked with panicked crowds beneath a sky ripped open by purple lightning. A red-suited figure swung between skyscrapers trailing smoke. Kane staggered sideways, retching violently. His stomach heaved as phantom tastes flooded his mouth—copper blood, fried circuitry, something impossibly sweet like candied violets. The laboratory's sterile air tasted thick with imminent violence.
Through the sensory tsunami, two impossible instincts surfaced.
Blue fire sparked at Kane's fingertips—purer than flame, colder than Arctic ice—while ghostly, grinning mouths split the air around his knuckles, tasting the panic like spoiled wine. The paradox coiled in his gut: Six Eyes' crisp, detached perception slicing through the building's weak points alongside Sukuna's raw hunger urging him to tear out throats. A technician burst into the corridor, shouting in frantic Japanese about "containment breach!" Kane didn't understand the words, but the man's fear smelled acidic, sharp.
His vision fragmented further—solid walls became gossamer veils. He saw the red-suited figure outside grappling with winged creatures dripping molten rock. Simultaneously, he perceived the panicked technician's frantic heartbeat as a frantic drumbeat against his ribs. Then, beneath the roar of overlapping senses, his own forearm arrested his gaze. Black tattoos coiled across his skin like predatory vines, impossible ink settling deep in his flesh. They pulsed faintly with inner heat—*Komainu fangs here? A skull motif bleeding into scaled patterns?* A cold dread prickled his spine. These weren't decorations. They felt alive. Anchored.
Catching his fragmented reflection in a chrome instrument panel, Kane froze. Gone was his familiar, weary face—angular cheekbones replaced by an unnervingly elegant structure framed by Gōjo's distinctive silver-white hair. Worse were the eyes. Four irises, sapphire-blue and unnervingly aware, blinked back at him in terrifying unison. Each pair seemed to focus independently—one set tracing the technician scrambling backward, another dissecting the humming circuitry inside the wall panel beside him. The Six Eyes processed distances, vectors, potential escape routes with icy precision, while Sukuna's innate senses screamed warnings about the approaching heavy footsteps—boots thudding with lethal intent, accompanied by the distinct metallic click of weapons priming. Skin prickling, Kane felt Sukuna's visceral snarl bubble in his throat, a raw sound punctuated by ghostly mouths materializing and vanishing around his own lips, tasting the air's rising panic. Yet beneath it all, *his* core recoiled—this wasn't borrowed power; it *was* him now. The technician whimpered, eyes locked on the phantom mouths dissolving into wisps of cursed energy.
The sterile hallway blurred. Gōjo's ruthless calculus mapped every possible outcome: incapacitate the technician silently, exploit the structural weakness near the ventilation shaft overhead, vanish before reinforcements arrived. Simultaneously, Sukuna's bloodlust surged, demanding the technician's terror be savored, the bones snapped, the room painted crimson—all accompanied by phantom flashes of taste: iron-rich blood, brittle cartilage. Kane squeezed his eyes shut, wrestling the warring impulses. *No.* He wouldn't become Sukuna's puppet. He focused on the cold weight of the Six Eyes' perception—a lifeline of focus amidst the psychic storm. *Think.* Where was he? What caused this? The Six Eyes instantly parsed the distant chatter Kane's enhanced hearing caught: "…Subject Sigma acquisition complete… Tesseract energy spike confirmed…" The words were English, laced with a familiar bureaucratic indifference that echoed his dull supermarket job. Fury, hot and entirely Kane's own, fused with Sukuna's rage and Gōjo's icy contempt. Someone had *stolen* him. Experimented on him.
Alarms blared deafeningly overhead—a harsh, staccato rhythm that echoed Kane's frantic pulse. He raised his trembling hand toward the shaking technician, intending only to silence the man's terrified whimpers, to freeze his vocal cords just enough to *think*. Instead, pure cursed energy surged violently from his fingertip. Not the cool, controlled blue of Limitless—this was corrosive crimson, swirling like molten slag and smelling of burnt sugar and decay. It coalesced instantly into a perfect, humming sphere no larger than a marble. The "Red" technique, Gojos devastating reversal of gravity, flickered wildly within it—unstable, hungry. Kane gasped, his Six Eyes screaming warnings: the sphere wasn't *contained*. Its sheer destructive potential threatened to warp space itself, pulling metal panels inward with a groan. The technician scrambled backward, eyes locked on the anomaly, whispering "*Akuma...*"
Before Kane could react, a wave of pure malice—Sukuna's instinctive, primal urge to obliterate—flooded his mind. The sphere pulsed brighter, its hum deepening into an angry snarl. Tendrils of distorted gravity snaked outwards, tearing rivets from the ceiling panels overhead. Kane felt the pull deep in his bones, a sickening lurch towards annihilation. His Six Eyes mapped the inevitable cascade: the sphere collapsing inward would unleash a singularity, consuming the corridor, the technician, everything within ten meters. Phantom tastes assaulted him—shattered concrete, liquefied steel, the coppery tang of vaporized blood. *His* horror warred against Sukuna's vicious delight. "No!" The word tore from his throat, raw and desperate. He focused every ounce of Gōjo's icy precision, visualizing a complex web of spatial barriers—thin filaments of blue cursed energy flickering erratically around the crimson sphere. He wasn't containing it; he was *binding* it, forcing Sukuna's chaotic technique into the impossibly fine latticework of Limitless. The effort felt like holding back a collapsing star with spider silk.
With a gasp that tasted of ozone and blood, Kane *shoved* his outstretched hand sideways. The sphere—still crackling with contained "Red"—streaked across the corridor like a miniature comet. It slammed into the reinforced security door sealing the hallway's end. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then, space itself buckled. A silent sphere of distorted reality bloomed outward, swallowing the thick alloy door whole. It didn't explode; it simply ceased to exist, replaced by a jagged hole into darkness beyond. The air hissed violently inward. Dust, debris, and shattered fluorescent lights vanished into the sudden vacuum before settling amidst a profound, ringing silence.
Kane lowered his shaking hand. Cold sweat traced paths down his temples. The technician trembled, wide-eyed, in a corner, unharmed. Beyond the perfectly spherical void, where the door had been, echoed distant screams and renewed gunfire. Kane's Six Eyes instantly parsed the scene: a chaotic laboratory floor, shattered equipment, figures in tactical gear rushing toward the breach. But his gaze snapped back to his own forearm. The tattoos—now clearly depicting stylized komainu lion-dogs intertwined with barbed fang motifs—pulsed faintly crimson. Sukuna's presence growled within him, predatory and amused. *Good*, it seemed to whisper. *Tear them apart.*
Shadows filled the ragged hole where the door had been—three armored shapes silhouetted against emergency lights. Their rifles snapped upward, barrels gleaming. Kane didn't consciously decide. One moment, he stood gasping; the next, Sukuna's instincts surged like floodwater. His fingers flickered. The air screamed. Two invisible slashes—Cleave and Dismantle—lashed outward faster than thought. No grand gesture, just the lethal economy of innate technique. A helmet crumpled inward with a wet crunch. An armored torso split diagonally from shoulder to hip, spraying crimson across sterile white in a hot, metallic mist. The third figure stumbled backward, his arm severed cleanly at the elbow; he stared, frozen, at the stump before screaming. The coppery scent of blood mixed with ozone flooded Kane's nostrils, thick and cloying. Sukuna's phantom mouths grinned along his jawline, tasting the terror.
Chaos erupted beyond the breach: frantic shouts, klaxons wailing, boots scrambling. Kane's Six Eyes mapped it all—heat signatures, structural weaknesses, the precise vectors of incoming projectiles before they were even fired. Simultaneously, Sukuna's awareness snarled at the reinforcements massing down the corridor, numbering twelve, their adrenaline-sour stink sharpening the air. Kane pivoted, his new silver-white hair whipping across his unnerving eyes. He needed distance. Cover. Time to understand the storm raging inside him. Gōjo's cold precision calculated the optimal trajectory instantly: a shattered observation window high on the lab's west wall. He gathered cursed energy, visualizing spatial distortion—but Sukuna roared rejection. *Too slow. Too weak.* An image burned through Kane's mind: not flight, but fire. Not evasion, but annihilation. Raw power condensed around a primal urge: *Purge them.*
Instinct overruled calculation. Kane planted his boots, one hand snapping forward as if gripping an invisible bowstring, fingers curling taut. The other pulled back, knuckles straining. Flickers of dark crimson cursed energy ignited at his fingertips, coalescing not into flame, but into a crackling longbow formed of pure malice. Its limbs hummed with unstable pressure. Between the fingers of his draw-hand, the air hissed and warped, heat haze shimmering as Sukuna's cursed energy solidified into a pulsing arrow shaft—black core swirling with deep red embers. It smelled of scorched earth and rotting amber. Kane felt its impossible weight pulling against him, vibrating with barely contained destruction. The technique's name surfaced unbidden: **Fuga**—Wildfire. The hallway beyond filled with soldiers shouting commands, their rifles clicking into firing positions. Kane exhaled—a low, guttural sound borrowed from Sukuna—and released.
The arrow tore forward. It didn't fly; it *erupted*. A screaming comet of condensed annihilation ripped down the corridor. Walls boiled away on contact, not melting but disintegrating into swirling ash. The air tasted like incinerated metal. The soldiers vanished inside its expanding corona of absolute dissolution—not screams, just silence as twelve bodies ceased to exist, armor vaporizing faster than dust. The light was blinding, violent purple-white. Support pillars groaned, buckling inward. Ceiling panels shattered. Kane shielded his four eyes, staggering as the shockwave slammed back, thick with the scent of ionized air and absolute absence. Where the hallway had been, only a smoldering trench thirty yards long remained, edges glowing fiercely, revealing twisted rebar and cracked foundation dripping molten concrete. Distant alarms shrieked like wounded beasts. Sukuna's satisfaction was a deep, resonant growl within his bones. Kane stared at the devastation. His hand trembled—not from exertion, but from the horrifying ease of it. The komainu tattoos pulsed hot crimson on his forearm, tracing predatory shapes in the dim, swirling dust. He hadn't merely escaped. He'd unleashed hell.
He looked up. The reinforced ceiling wasn't just damaged—it was screaming its structural flaws to his Six Eyes. Stress fractures spiderwebbed overhead like luminous cracks in glass. Weakness-points screamed silently: *here, and here, and here*. Limitless power stirred cold and precise within him. Sukuna sensed his intent and snarled—crude. Slow. Why *slice* when you could explode? Kane tamped down the King of Curses' boiling impatience. Blue cursed energy ignited at Kane's fingertips, pure and icy. With a flick of his wrist, infiinituy bloomed outward above him—not an attack, but an implosion. A sphere of inverse gravitational force manifested silently against the ceiling panels. It didn't pull—it *sucked*. Space itself screamed inward. Steel beams groaned, twisted, then folded like wet cardboard. Concrete slab buckled violently inward, vanishun into an infinitesimal point. The breach wasn't shattered—it was unmade. A ragged hole yawned open fifty feet wide, revealing a bruised twilight sky choked with smoke and distant airborne debris. Cold wind whipped through. Rain flecked Kane's silver-white hair. Below, emergency klaxons faded into terrified confusion. The smell of open sky and ozone flooded the corridor. Sukuna's phantom mouths gasped hungrily at the air. *Sky,* they whispered. *Freedom.*
Gravity inverted beneath Kane's boots. The Six Eyes recalibrated instantly—vectors shifting, wind resistance calculated, updrafts mapped. Limitless energy rippled beneath him like an invisible tide. He didn't jump. He simply stepped off reality. Air solidified beneath his soles, crystalline blue light flaring momentarily as cursed energy formed flawless platforms. Another step upward. Then another. Ascending the shaft of broken ceiling toward the open wound above, suspended effortlessly on nothingness. Wind tugged at his clothes. Rain plastered stray strands of hair to his temples. Below, figures swarmed toward the gaping ruin he'd left behind—tiny, insignificant ants pointing useless rifles skyward. Sukuna hissed contempt; a flick of Kane's fingers could scatter their atoms across the city. Instead, Kane ascended faster. His new eyes scanned the horizon: jagged skylines choked by strange, alien architecture, fires raging unchecked. Screams and distant sonic booms echoed. A streak of red and gold battled winged horrors above a crumbling bridge. *New York,* his Six Eyes deduced instantly. *But not his.* The air tasted alien—thick with ozone and something worse, like irradiated decay. Panic clawed beneath his ribs. Where was the farm? The rusted fence? The cicadas? Sukuna chuckled darkly. *Irrelevant.* Phantom jaws snapped near Kane's ears. *Focus.*
Twilight bruised the sky. Kane perched atop a shattered parapet, boots balanced precariously on fractured stone. Rainwater streamed crimson-streaked runoff beneath him. His reflection shimmered in a deep puddle: silver hair limp and ragged against unnervingly elegant features, the impossible four eyes burning cobalt beneath soaked lashes. He flexed his fingers. Lightning arced overhead; thunder cracked like cosmic knuckles. Sukuna's hunger surged—a visceral craving for violence echoing the storm's fury, phantom tastes flooding Kane's mouth: wet asphalt beneath crushed skulls, ozone mingled with freshly spilled iron-rich blood. Distantly, sirens wailed above the downpour. Vehicles screeched. Something massive—too heavy, too wrong—stomped through streets unseen. Kane's Six Eyes parsed the chaos with icy detachment: threats aligned into vectors, escape routes unfolding like origami maps. But Sukuna snarled. Enemy. Prey. Too close. Kane's gaze snapped downward. Three armored figures clambered onto the rooftop ledge below him—weapons drawn, movements cautious. Their armor bore unfamiliar insignia: a serpent coiled around a jagged tower. Fear radiated off them—acidic, pungent. They shouted commands in guttural German. Kane didn't need translation. "*Fassung verloren*," one muttered—loss of containment. The komainu tattoos on Kane's forearm flared crimson. Liquid shadows pooled around his boots. Sukuna's phantom mouths split the air inches from his knuckles, tasting their terror like spoiled wine. *Mine,* growled the King within.
Cold fury fused with Sukuna's bloodlust. Kane raised trembling hands—not for mercy, but annihilation. His fingers wove intricate shapes: thumb and pinky crossed, index and middle pressed tight. The komainu tattoos blazed like embers beneath soaked fabric. Instinct guided him—dark, ancient, eager. Cursed energy roared outward: a viscous black tide flooding the rooftop. The air curdled into thick tar. Reality screamed as angular shadows snapped upward—bleached skulls fused with rotting torii gates, ribcages twisted into jagged arches. A deafening chant echoed—thousands of voices whispering obscene sutras. The rain ceased. The world dissolved. Kane stood amidst desecration incarnate: Malevolent Shrine. Below, the soldiers froze, horror etching their faces as they glimpsed impossible vistas—endless desert sand beneath a bleeding sky, rib bones protruding like shattered monoliths. Death-scent overwhelmed Kane: dry dust, decayed roses, and iron. Sukuna's phantom jaws widened impossibly, gleaming wetly in the shrine's dim light. Kane's voice emerged—dual-toned, layered with icy calculation and primal hunger. "**Fühle die Leere.**"
Cleave tore sideways. Dismantle ripped downward. Unseen slashes atomized armor, flesh, bone. No spray of gore—just silent, surgical erasure. Limbs ceased to exist. Torsos dissolved into crimson mist. Only faint outlines remained where men stood moments before—ghost-shapes fading into the desecrated air. Sukuna's satisfaction roared through Kane's veins—hotter than the fading storm. Phantom jaws snapped shut on swallowed screams. Silence reclaimed the rooftop shrine. Rain resumed its monotonous patter beyond the domain's fraying edges. Kane breathed. Copper and roses coated his tongue. Reality shuddered. Malevolent Shrine collapsed inward, imploding into swirling shadows that vanished like exhaled smoke. Kane staggered backward, rain stinging his eyes—both pairs. His reflection wavered once more in the crimson puddle below. The komainu tattoos pulsed faintly… luminous. Eyes lifted toward the battle-streaked skyline. Someone powerful was coming. Fast. Kane felt the approach like static on his skin—a low-frequency hum beneath the rain's drumbeat. Six Eyes pinpointed the trajectory instantly: northwest quadrant, altitude nine thousand feet… accelerating. Threat-assessment screamed: Extremis-Laced Armor Configuration. Energy Signature: Repulsor-Thorium Blend. Hostile Intent Threshold: Critical. Sukuna snarled anticipation. Kane's lips peeled back. Time for pests to sting.
Blue cursed energy ignited beneath Kane's soles. Gravity inverted—a rapturous weightlessness. He ascended effortlessly, rising thirty feet above the cracked parapet, rain streaking past his silver-white hair. Wind whipped his clothes taut. Below, the ruined S.H.I.E.L.D. facility shrank—a scar amidst Manhattan's jagged corpse. Phantom mouths flickered along his jawline, tasting ozone and distant plasma fire. His fingers lifted—slow, deliberate paradoxes. Sukuna's instincts coiled alongside Gojo's precision. The chant began low—a guttural fusion of ancient dialects layered with analytical certainty. **"Nine ropes…"** Lines of azure cursed energy snapped taut around his left hand—pulling disparate vectors into convergence, binding opposing forces like sinew to bone. Static crackled across his wet knuckles. Raindrops halted mid-fall nearby, suspended in trembling spheres.
**"Polarized light…"** His right hand twisted palm-upward. The air fractured into blinding prisms—light splitting into impossible spectrums. Six Eyes parsed each refraction: infrared bleeding to ultraviolet, gamma rays interlacing with microwaves. A latticework of pure electromagnetic potential shimmered into being—forging cages within cages. Distant klaxons warped into dissonant harmonics. Sukuna's grin widened—ghostly teeth manifesting briefly in the polarized chaos. Kane's voice rose—amplified by cursed resonance. **"Crow and declaration…"** Dark specks swirled—not birds but condensed malice—forming shadowy avian shapes that circled overhead, screeching silent sutras. Reality shuddered. Pressure dropped. Rain hissed as it vaporized near his hovering form.
**"Between front and back…"** Kane's palms slammed together. Spatial dimensions screamed. Violet light—impossibly dense, hungry, paradoxical—coalesced violently between his hands. **"Imaginary Technique…"** Six Eyes visualized the singularity's birth: mass converging from infinite points, gravity reversing within its core, space-time shredded into quantum filaments. Sukuna roared approval—a sound felt more than heard. The orb pulsed—thrumming with cataclysmic potential. Shadows deepened city-wide. Distant screams cut silent. Iron Man's repulsors screamed closer—a blinding streak of gold and crimson against bruised clouds. Kane's lips peeled back—twin-toned voice echoing across the drowned city: **"HOLLOW PURPLE!"** The singularity lunged. Not forward—but *everywhere*.