Getou Suguru had imagined every conceivable possibility—except this one: that his parents could actually die.
Parents were supposed to be a child's model, his pillar of support, the steady figures he could always turn to.
Yet he himself had been a freakish sort of child.
Because he could see cursed spirits from the time he was very small, psychiatrists had labeled his visions as "hallucinations." To escape the pills, to stop the endless accusations and worried glances, he gradually learned to lie. He learned to conceal the cuts and bruises that appeared after every encounter with a pursuing curse, to hide the truth of being hunted night after night.
As he grew older he became stronger, more confident. Eventually the hunted became the hunter: he began to pursue the cursed spirits instead, subduing his very first one purely on instinct.
He came to believe he had been given a mission—to shield ordinary people who could not see the monsters that walked among them. At the same time he grew increasingly irritated by his father's constant attempts to control him, by his mother's well-meaning but pointless nagging.
His body was exceptionally resilient; his physical talent was considerable; wounds closed quickly and pain could not break him. Yet the people closest to him—ordinary people—kept wounding him in a way no curse ever could, simply by viewing him through the lens of normal human expectations.
[You're just ordinary people.]
—So you will never truly understand me.
[You can't see the monsters, yet you treat me as though I am the monster.]
—So you and I are not the same kind.
[You're so weak, so fragile—and you don't even realize I've been secretly protecting you all this time.]
—So tell me: is it you who owes me, or is it I who owes you?
As a young boy, Getou Suguru had poured every ounce of his strength into fighting off cursed spirits. With his small, childish arms he had stood guard at the front door, driving away low-grade curses again and again. He never realized that the very fear he instilled in his parents—each time they saw their son bloodied and wild-eyed after "nothing" had happened—was itself the breeding ground for the next low-grade curse to appear.
He had stubbornly, purely, and unyieldingly protected his ordinary parents.
[I'm pretty amazing, aren't I?]
—So when will you finally understand me?
[It's not just my grades. I can be perfect in every possible way. I'm a genius. I'm strong.]
—So please don't let anything happen to you. Don't leave me an orphan.
"No! No—don't die! I'll take you to Shoko right now!"
A colossal wave of terror suddenly crashed over Getou Suguru, drowning him completely. In that brief, frozen pause he finally understood—truly understood—what his parents truly meant to him.
How many years had it been like this?
The father-son bond, the mother-son bond, both rigid and brittle for so long.
The volume of blood pouring from their hearts was enormous; arterial spray had fanned out in radiating crimson droplets across the floor and walls. Almost in the same instant Getou recognized the cause of death: they had been stabbed straight through the heart by an intruder. The weapon had been yanked free afterward, and they had bled out in a catastrophic cardiac hemorrhage.
His gaze snapped down to the fruit knife still clenched in his own right hand—the bloodstained fruit knife.
Was this the murder weapon?
"Yesterday… was it cursed spirits attacking?" Getou's thoughts spun wildly, fragmented.
"No—no, that's not right. I'm clearly still in 2006, not 2016." He kept desperately arguing with reality itself, trying to anchor himself.
"There's no way anyone could survive that kind of blood loss." His mind teetered on the very edge of collapse, his rationality hanging by the thinnest thread. "Who in the world would break into my house, bypass me completely, and instead go straight for my parents—who aren't even sorcerers?!"
Getou Suguru dropped to his knees before his parents, overwhelmed by the crushing pain of having failed to protect the very people he had sworn to shield.
"I never once imagined losing you!"
The whole reason he had wanted to protect ordinary people in the first place was so that he could keep his own parents safe!
"I'm sorry!"
"I'm so sorry!" The repeated apologies poured out of him—each one a raw expression of regret for his own arrogance, the most heartbreaking words Getou's parents had ever heard from their son.
Getou's mother and father could not move. They had lost all ability to tell him the truth. The anesthetic kept their bodies locked in a state of semi-consciousness, while the sedative preserved the clarity of their minds, preventing any wild surges of emotion.
Getou Suguru's eyes had dried up completely, yet his voice carried the thick nasal timbre of someone who had been crying. His heart felt as though an invisible hand had seized it and wrung it out like a soaked rag, squeezing forth nothing but bitter, acrid juice.
In his mind's eye flashed the image from the mirror earlier: the twenty-six-year-old "Getou Suguru," haggard and worn.
Long-haired monk with lips drained of color, red-rimmed eyes, the loose kesa robes hanging loosely on his frame, too many empty folds where muscle and youth had once filled them out.
A monk who carried sorrow as heavy as his own.
"How could he look so much like me?" Getou whispered hoarsely. Then, in the space of a single heartbeat, realization struck like lightning out of a clear sky. "This is all an act?"
He had been dressed up by his classmates to play the role of his twenty-six-year-old self—and yet that future version of himself had also wept bitterly?
The only explanation was that everything had been scripted from the beginning, every detail orchestrated by Asou Akiya. There had never been any cursed spirit attack.
His parents had been made to participate in this farce by "dying."
"Great! they're still warm…"
Getou Suguru wrapped his arms around each of his parents in turn where they lay collapsed on the floor. Blood soaked into the folds of his kesa robes, but beneath the staining warmth—real body heat lingered against his chest!
A corpse could never retain this much residual temperature for so long.
"Heartbeat, there's a heartbeat too."
In utter disbelief he pressed his ear to their chests and listened—clear, steady pulses answered him. The notion that their hearts had been pierced through was nothing but illusion; the blood itself was merely a prop designed to simulate death. Someone had managed to convince his parents to cooperate in this utterly unhinged charade!
Who would ever believe such a thing if he told them?
A pair of parents pretending to be murdered on their sixteen-year-old son's birthday?
Getou Suguru's hands and feet trembled violently with the surge of emotion. His voice rose, cracking into something almost manic:
"Asou Akiya! You absolute lunatic! Have you become addicted to deceiving people? Staging a class reunion ten years from now—did that really require me to wake up at dawn and find my own parents slaughtered?!"
"And besides—am I some pathetic failure ten years from now? There's no way I would ever be unable to protect my parents!"
He commanded so many cursed spirits. He could easily station a few around his mother and father; the moment any of them were exorcised he would receive the alert instantly.
"Liar."
Getou Suguru forcibly wrestled his spiraling frenzy back under control.
"You're all finished."
A grotesque, feral smile twisted across his face. He gathered his parents' limp forms into his arms one after the other and carried them carefully to the living-room sofa, laying them down side by side.
He swiped roughly at the stinging corners of his eyes—thankfully no tears had actually fallen. Otherwise it would have been far too humiliating; his classmates would never let him live it down for the rest of his life.
"Since nothing actually happened to you, just rest for a while. I'll be back soon." Getou Suguru released a swarm of cursed spirits that unfurled like dark wings, enveloping the entire Getou residence in an invisible barrier that forbade any stranger from crossing the threshold. "If you still can't wake up by the time I return, I'll drag every last one of my classmates here to apologize on their knees."
With a flick of his wrist he sent the second prop—the bloodstained fruit knife—hurtling through the air. It embedded itself deep into the wooden surface of the tea table with a sharp crack, sinking in a full three inches, the blade quivering with vicious finality.
As he turned toward the front door, his footsteps faltered for just a moment.
"I don't know whether you can hear me or not."
"In any case… don't overthink it. I'm still your child. Even if you've never truly understood me… I will always protect you."
"It was because of you that I was able to grow up healthy and live long enough to reach fifteen and join Tokyo Jujutsu High."
The third fill-in-the-blank question on his history exam had read: Because they can see the existence of cursed spirits, wild, unregistered jujutsu sorcerer children generally struggle to [survive].
Compared to most, Getou Suguru had been relatively fortunate. He had not died prematurely, nor had his cursed energy ever spiraled out of control and indirectly injured his parents.
He turned back, fetched a thick blanket from the nearby cupboard, and gently draped it over them both.
"I… might actually love you."
He bowed his head, bitterness flooding every corner of his chest, and in the quiet of his mind he finally gave voice to the words he had always refused to speak aloud: [It's just that this love makes me feel too much pain, so much that I long to run far away from it.]
The sound of the door closing came from the entryway. The Geto couple knew their son had left after realizing it was all an act.
He had not stayed behind to look after them.
Instead, he left with unwavering determination, searching for the other three.
At the Bulgari Hotel Tokyo, Geto Suguru descended upon the helipad atop the hotel building astride his "Rainbow Dragon."
His monastic robes were thoroughly soaked in blood. He adjusted his sleeves, pressed his palms together, his expression utterly cold and detached. From the rooftop downward, he forced his way into the hotel with unyielding ferocity, catching the staff completely off guard. Almost immediately, they summoned security to block his path.
"Please stop right there!"
This was unmistakably the image of a murderous monk!
"I have an invitation."
Getou Suguru advanced step by step toward the elevator, and not a single security guard could withstand even one exchange against him.
The elevator descended swiftly and smoothly, arriving at the first floor with a soft "ding."
Getou Suguru reached the gathering place indicated on the invitation.
The cursed energy representing negative emotions surged outward in a flood. Getou Suguru let out a cold, mocking laugh that befitted an evil monk—his long hair reaching his waist, his bloodstained robes, the ferocious aura exploding from him stripped away every trace of his identity as a jujutsu sorcerer, making him resemble a curse user far more convincingly than any true curse user ever could.
In the grand hall, Getou Suguru spotted a man and a woman seated at the edge of a table, engaged in conversation.
The white-haired man wore a black blindfold, his shoulders broad and legs long; his features remained hidden, but he was dressed in the teacher's uniform of Tokyo Jujutsu High.
The brown-haired woman bore dark circles under her eyes, her feet clad in high heels. She tilted her head back to gaze at the crystal chandelier, exuding the weary exhaustion of someone who felt that living was worse than dying.
As they turned their heads toward the classmate standing in the doorway, an overwhelming sense of things remain the same, yet the people have changed washed over them—
When they turned to face the classmate standing by the doorway, an overwhelming sense of everything has changed crashed into them—
The brown-haired woman was the first to lower her gaze, falling silent.
"Getou."
Only the white-haired man lifted a hand, his voice even, subdued, heavy with the weight of a reunion long overdue.
He greeted Getou, and the wave of maturity that washed over him was almost frightening—as though he had aged ten years overnight. Beneath the black blindfold lay an unreadable expression, sealed away from view.
Getou Suguru felt his breath catch.
Someone once achingly familiar had, in an instant, become both stranger and kin.
When he took in the white-haired man's attire more clearly, his body reacted before his mind could—an instinctive stress response surged through him, and he nearly released a cursed spirit on impulse, purely to protect himself.
Ten years of time—
it was astonishing how plainly it could be seen.
As if a master painter had hidden behind the scenes and flung pigment across the canvas, conjuring an image from nothing. With each stroke, the brush carved out mottled yet brilliant traces of passing years, so vivid that the onlooker felt shaken to the core, as though they were staring straight into the future itself.
"Gojo?"
Did this birthday event really need to be this realistic?!