The first sensation was the headache.
Not the gentle, throbbing kind that came from too much cheap beer. This was the feeling of someone drilling a railroad spike directly into his frontal lobe while simultaneously setting off fireworks behind his eyeballs. Dante groaned, the sound scraping out of his throat like gravel.
The second sensation was the cold.
Stone. Concrete. The kind of industrial chill that soaked through clothes and settled into bones. His cheek pressed against something that felt like a morgue slab, and for a brief, horrible moment, he wondered if he'd died again.
Wouldn't that be just fucking perfect.
The third sensation was the noise.
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG.
Metal on metal. Right next to his goddamn ear.
"WAKE THE FUCK UP, LIVESTOCK!"
The voice hit like a slap across the face. Rough. Gravelly. The kind of voice that belonged to a man who'd spent his life yelling at people who couldn't yell back.
Dante's eyes snapped open.
Darkness. Not the pristine white void from before, but oppressive black broken only by a dim, flickering light somewhere above. His pupils fought to adjust, and the pain behind his eyes cranked up another notch.
Okay. Okay. Think. Last thing I remember was...
The door. Walking through it. Then nothing. Just the sensation of falling through reality like a stone dropped into deep water.
He pushed himself up on his elbows, blinking against the gloom. The walls came into focus slowly. Poured concrete, smooth and industrial. No windows. A single wire-caged light bulb overhead casting weak, yellowish illumination that made everything look sickly. The floor beneath him was the same concrete, and in the corner, he spotted a drain.
A drain.
A scraping sound drew his attention to the steel door. A slot near the bottom opened, and a brown paper bag sailed through, landing on the floor with a soft thud.
"Boss likes her meals ripe. Eat up. Don't die too soon."
The slot slammed shut.
Meals.
Ripe.
Dante stared at the bag. His brain, still rebooting from whatever cosmic upload Gojo and Sukuna had performed on his soul, processed the words one syllable at a time.
Voices filtered through the door. Muffled but clear enough.
"Man, I wish I could get a taste of that girl. Just once."
A nervous laugh answered him.
"Are you crazy? She'd drain you dry before you even unzipped your fly."
"Yeah..."
The wistful voice took on a dreamy quality.
"But what a way to go, right?"
SMACK.
The sharp sound of palm meeting skull echoed through the steel.
"Knock it off, you idiots."
A third voice. Older. Harder. The kind that had seen things and stopped asking questions.
"The Boss has her stock, we have ours. Now let's go get some pussy!"
A chorus of voices erupted in agreement, whooping and laughing like frat boys on their way to a strip club.
The bolt on the door scraped open.
Light flooded the cell and the sound of music filled the basemeny.
Jazz.
No, not quite. Something sleeker. City pop, maybe.
Dante caught a glimpse of the hallway beyond. Dark wood paneling. Soft lighting. Expensive.
Then the door slammed shut.
The music became a distant throb. A pulse he could feel in his teeth.
And the migraine exploded into a full-blown catastrophe.
Oh god.
The dim bulb overhead transformed into a supernova. Every crack in the concrete wall suddenly rendered in crystalline detail. He could see the individual grains in the poured stone. The texture of the floor. The way dust particles floated through the air in slow, lazy spirals.
Too much.
Too fucking much.
His hands flew to his face, palms pressing against his eyes like he could physically shove the sensory overload back into his skull. His breath came in short, sharp gasps.
A word surfaced from the chaos. A memory from the void.
Six Eyes.
His heart stopped.
The pain wasn't going away. The hyper-awareness of every minute detail in his concrete box wasn't fading. This was his new normal.
Wait.
Six Eyes.
Gojo.
Sukuna.
His hands dropped from his face. He stared at the concrete wall opposite him, vision still swimming with too much information.
That wasn't a dream.
Holy shit, that wasn't a dream.
They'd actually done it. Two dead gods had poured themselves into his soul like whiskey into a shot glass and sent him tumbling into a new world. And now he was stuck in a meat locker with a brain that processed reality like it was hooked up to the goddamn Matrix.
His stomach chose that moment to remind him it existed.
GRRRRROOOOWWWWL.
Right. Food.
Dante crawled toward the paper bag, movements sluggish.
He tore open the bag.
Inside was a bottle of cold green tea, condensation already forming on the plastic, and a single onigiri. White rice. Salmon filling. Wrapped in perfect, crisp nori.
He didn't think.
He just ate.
The rice hit his tongue and his body reacted like a man dying of thirst finding water. He tore into it, barely chewing, shoving it down his throat in desperate, graceless bites. The tea followed. Cold. Slightly bitter. Perfect.
God, when did I last eat?
The question had no answer. Time was a blur. Death. The void. Waking up here. How long had it been?
"A-are you alright?"
Dante froze.
The voice came from his left.
He swallowed the last of the onigiri and turned his head toward the source.
The wall looked solid. Concrete. But now that he was paying attention, he could see a thin line. A seam. Another cell. Right next to his.
He opened his mouth to answer, then stopped.
Think, dumbass.
He was in a meat locker run by someone called "the Boss" who apparently drained people dry. Guards who talked about "stock" like they were discussing livestock. Music and expensive décor upstairs.
He cleared his throat.
"Define 'alright.'"
A pause. Then, quieter.
"You're... you're new."
Not a question. An observation.
Dante leaned back against the cold wall, closing his eyes against the sensory assault. The darkness helped. Marginally.
"Yeah. Fresh delivery. You been here long?"
Silence stretched between them. Long enough that Dante started to wonder if she'd decided not to answer.
Then, barely above a whisper.
"I don't know anymore."
Fuck.
He could hear it in her voice. The kind of exhaustion that came from losing track of days. From giving up on counting.
"What's your name?"
Another pause. Like she'd forgotten she had one.
"Sakiko."
The name was small. Fragile. Like she was testing it out to see if it still fit.
Dante kept his eyes closed, focusing on the sound of her voice instead of the overwhelming visual data trying to crack his skull open.
"Dante."
"That's... an unusual name."
A hint of curiosity. The first sign of life in her tone.
"Yeah, well. Unusual situation."
He heard a soft sound. Maybe a laugh. Maybe a sob. Hard to tell.
Dante kept his voice low, stripped of the sarcasm that usually armored every sentence.
"I need you to focus for me, okay? They knocked me out pretty good before they brought me here. My head's still scrambled." He paused, letting his breathing slow. "What year is it?"
Silence stretched between them. Long enough that Dante wondered if the question had scared her somehow.
"It's... 1997."
The year landed like a punch to the liver. 1997. He'd died in 2023. But the void gods had made no promises about when he'd land, only that he'd get another shot.
Twenty-six years in the past. Or a different timeline entirely. Or both. Fuck.
"And we're in Tokyo, right? Shinjuku?"
"Yes." Her voice carried a thread of confusion beneath the fear. "You really don't remember?"
"Like I said. Scrambled."
He could work with this. Play the amnesiac card. Better than trying to explain cosmic reincarnation to a terrified girl through a concrete wall.
Dante opened his eyes again, immediately regretting it as the dim bulb overhead tried to sear through his retinas. He forced himself to adjust, to breathe through the sensory assault.
The guards had said something. About the Boss. About draining people.
"Those guys outside, before they left. They talked about the Boss 'draining' people dry." He kept his tone conversational, like discussing the weather. "You know what they meant by that?"
The temperature in the adjoining cell seemed to drop.
When Sakiko spoke again, her voice had shrunk to barely above a whisper. The kind of quiet people used when saying something out loud might make it more real.
"The club upstairs. It's very exclusive. Very expensive. Men come here because they've heard about the Boss. About how beautiful she is."
A shuddering breath.
"But she doesn't sleep with them. She takes them to private rooms. And when they come out..."
The sentence died.
Dante waited. His fingers drummed against his knee, a nervous habit from his old life.
"They look hollow. Like someone scooped everything important out of them and they didn't even notice it was gone. They pay her. They thank her. Then they leave."
Jesus.
"Some people though. The ones who resist or make trouble. She doesn't let them leave." Another pause, heavier this time. "I've heard the guards take people out of cells. They don't come back."
Dante's jaw clenched hard enough to make his teeth ache. The rage that had gotten him killed the first time surged hot and immediate in his chest. Some things transcended death, apparently. His protective instincts were one of them.
"I think..." Sakiko's voice cracked. "I think the Boss is a Devil."
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